4
BOSTON, April 19, 1775
1
It was 7:30 a.m.1 There was a chill in the morning air; but the sky was clear, and the early sun was striking shadows from the steeples of the Boston meetinghouses.
On the parade ground, formed of Scollay Square and the streets on either side of it, Brigadier Hugh, Earl Percy sat on a white horse, scanning the three regiments of infantry formed in ranks before him—the First Brigade of some 1,200 men that he commanded.2
The young earl, with his gently slanting eyes and his thin bony nose, was an aristocrat of one of the oldest and most famous families in British history. William de Percy had invaded England with William the Conqueror in 1066. Since then, his descendants had played key roles in every major conflict in which Britain had been involved. Hugh Percy was tough, confident and very cool—as he was just about to prove.
His soldiers, like all the British army, were a rough lot of men, underpaid, disciplined by the terror of awful punishment, dragged into the service by press gangs, enlisted drunk in English pubs or tempted into joining up as a way of getting out of jail.
Their officers regarded them as very close to animals—one reason why they trained them to operate, like packs of hounds, in tight ranks in which they were easy to control—and their needs were catered to in much the same way as those of their horses. Drunkenness was tolerated as a necessary way of letting off steam, although in the recent inactive months within the confines of Boston it had required a strict curbing. Women—wives and prostitutes—accompanied the troops in numbers that were laid down by the commander in chief who had the same absolute control over them as he had over the men. In Boston the allocation was seven women to a company.
Normally, the army lived on looting to compensate for the soldiers’ low wages—and the women played an accepted and skillful role in plundering operations—but in America this was strictly forbidden. The commanders, relying on the fact that many of the colonials were loyal, wanted to offend them as little as possible. None of the generals, however, ever succeeded in stopping looting despite the employment of every kind of punishment, from death to terrible floggings.
The men ranged in the long ranks in Scollay Square before Lord Percy were not, in fact, as resplendent as they would have been a few years back. Then the sartorial demands made on British troops had been excessive, and saluting had been introduced because the old custom of doffing hats played such havoc with coiffured wigs. All the same, the soldiers looked impressive enough in their black tricorns over hair that was greased and clubbed at the back, with their white breeches and the long scarlet coats crossed by two broad belts.
As company after company was called to attention by the sergeants, there was the continuing crash on the parade ground of the butts of the firelocks—the heavy smoothbore brown Bess muskets that were not as accurate as rifles but could do a lot of damage when their solid shot, weighing more than an ounce, was fired in barrage by a line of advancing men.
The officers, in their high black boots, some on horses and some on foot, waited near their divisions. Like their men, they wore cocked hats and long scarlet coats, but their shoulders were decorated lavishly with gold epaulets. Instead of heavy firelocks, they carried light fusil muskets, fitted with bayonets. Across their bodies, they wore yellow sashes, made broad enough to act as sling stretchers if they were wounded.
By that night many of them would need their sashes.
At one end of the parade ground were two 6-pound cannon, each behind six horses,3 traced in pairs and held by the civilian drivers the Army employed. Near them, formed in squads, were the gun teams—eleven to a cannon—in the blue uniform coats of the Royal Artillery.
There was also an ammunition wagon on the parade ground, but, as Artillery Colonel Samuel Cleaveland later reported to London, “Lord Percy refused to take it saying it might retard their march and that he did not imagine that there would be any occasion for more than was in the side boxes.” This meant that he was taking only twenty-four rounds for each gun.
At dawn a young officer had galloped across Boston Neck from the mainland with the news that reinforcements were needed for British troops who were already out in the country. Against this possibility, Gage had issued orders the previous night that the brigade was to be awake and ready at 4 a.m., but the order had been mislaid. As a result, the assembly on parade was already behind schedule.
It was 8:45, nearly four hours after the alert had reached General Gage in Province House, that Lord Percy and the First Brigade started marching across the neck—the advance guard first, followed by the artillery in front of the regiments. The drum and fife band was thumping out “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” an English soldiers’ song of the Seven Years’ War that mocked the straw-in-hair American provincials who were their allies. British bands always blared the long note of “Dandy” in derision, making it sound like a raspberry. That morning it was appropriate enough as a marching tune, for they were on their way out of Boston to help their comrades deal with the same provincial yokels who had inspired it.
The long months of waiting since the crisis in September had suddenly ended. Inevitable though the clash had always been, it had taken a surprisingly long time in coming. The winter had, in fact, passed without much in the way of alarms.
But Gage’s new hopes were soon to be cooled. Early in March, the situation in Massachusetts began to acquire a new intensity. On the fourth one of Gage’s agents reported that the Provincial Congress had appointed a committee to watch the British army. If it went out of Boston into the country, it was to summon the Minutemen to oppose the troops. “The Minutemen amount to 7,500,”4 reported the agent, “and are the picked men of the whole body of the militia and are properly armed.” Their whole magazine of powder, consisting of 90 to 100 barrels, was at Concord, 18 miles inland from Boston.
Five days later Gage had another intelligence note, this time in French, informing him that food supplies and arms for the militia were also being stored at Concord. This report was highly detailed, naming the exact location of the various dumps. The main magazine, in fact, was at the farm of James Barrett, who had just been appointed colonel of the local militia. Among the arms were cannon.
Cannon carried a special significance, albeit largely symbolic, for both the Americans and the British, and Gage was convinced that, limited though his military forces were, he could not just allow the Americans to build ever-growing arms dumps. He began making plans to raid the magazines at Concord.
Toward the end of March he sent out two young officers in disguise to reconnoiter the route to the town and to map the houses featured in his secret intelligence. A few days later he received news that placed the Concord dumps in a far more dangerous setting.
Among his spies, Gage had one superagent in the inner ring of the Provincial Congress—Dr. Benjamin Church, a leading member of the Faction and close associate of Samuel Adams and John Hancock. As a result,5 he soon learned that new developments were emerging in the Congress that was then meeting secretly at Cambridge. If he was going to act, it became clear, he needed to act quickly.
Samuel Adams and the aggressive groups in the Provincial Congress were promoting a confrontation with British troops. In March some of the soldiers of Lord Percy’s First Brigade, who had marched out of Boston on one of the routine excursions that had been part of British policy since the fall, had done some damage, and a string of protests had been sent in to the Congress. A new resolve had been passed, despite opposition from moderates who feared British retaliation: If the troops should march out of Boston again with artillery and baggage, “the country should be instantly alarmed . . . to oppose the march to the last extremity.”
The Congress had voted to raise immediately an army of 18,000 men—8,000 to come from Massachusetts and the remainder from other colonies. Already top men from the Committees of Correspondence in New Hampshire and Rhode Island had arrived in the province for discussions.
Gage was facing a big new crisis. Two days later news from London reached the Congress that more troops were on their way to Gage and that Parliament had voted for a tougher policy in America. Although Gage had not yet heard from Whitehall officially, the Congress was alarmed. Plans to raise the army were accelerated.
“A recess at this time could easily be brought about,” Gage’s spy in Congress suggested to him, “. . . it would prevent their taking hasty steps until he [the general] received his dispatches [from London] . . . a sudden blow struck now would overset all their plans.” Much of Gage’s organization was poor, but it would be hard to fault the quality of his information service.
Four days later, on April 15—presumably because Gage agreed to his spy’s suggestion—the Congress went into recess for two weeks.
Gage grabbed his opportunity. For psychological as well as practical reasons, the new crisis demanded a military gesture—demanded it, what is more, before the plans of the Provincial Congress could be finally formed. So Gage made plans for a raid on Concord and scheduled it for the night of April 18.
Against the background of growing tension, with the militia keen for a chance of putting into practice their training of the past few months, secrecy was vital. The raid would have to be sudden—and completed, if possible, before the Minutemen had time to organize in opposition.
At the same time, some kind of preparation was necessary, and the troops were soon aware that a military operation was imminent—as indeed, ultrasensitive as the port was to every change of mood, were the people of Boston. On Saturday, April 15, the day he knew that Congress had gone into recess, the general issued orders that the grenadiers and the light infantry6— Britain’s crack troops in Boston—should be relieved of normal duties. The cover story was that they were to learn new evolutions, but it was a thin one. “I dare say,” Lieutenant John Barker of the light infantry mused in his diary, “they have something for them to do.”
When that night the admiral ordered all the boats of the navy’s ships in Boston to tether under the stern of the Boyne, the big 70-gun man-of-war lying anchored off the port, the cover story seemed even more suspect.
On Tuesday, Gage activated the plan, still doing all he could to maintain secrecy. He summoned to Province House Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, a ruddy, corpulent regimental commander now nearing retirement age, and handed him sealed orders that were not to be opened until he started marching that evening.
At 8 p.m. the officers of the grenadiers and the light infantry were briefed: They were to have their men on the beach of Back Bay, where the Boston Common reached down to the water, in two hours’ time at 10. The soldiers were to be told nothing until the very last minute. They were to leave their barracks by the back entrances and to move to the beach in small groups as silently as possible.
If it had not been for the awkward jigsaw position of Boston, the Charles River would have streamed down from the town of Cambridge straight out into the harbor. As it was, because of the port on its peninsula, the waters of the river were diverted sharply north at its mouth before mingling with the tidal flow around Boston that went out on the ebb through the narrow channel that separated it from Charlestown. This stretch between the mouth of the Charles on the mainland and the west coast of Boston was called Back Bay.
By ten o’clock the 700 soldiers selected for the raid had slipped quietly across the common in small parties and were waiting by the water. When a dog had suddenly started to bark at one group, it had been silenced with a bayonet. The boats that had been assembled at HMS Boyne on Saturday had been rowed around to Back Bay and were waiting at the shore.
The moon was already high in a cloudless sky. Across the bay, the soldiers could see clearly the low hills and shoreline of the mainland.
Slowly, the ferrying operation began. The boats were loaded; then their crews rowed them, against a cross tide that had just started flooding to a beach a mile and a quarter away on the mainland.
The landing point was on a farm that was out of sight of any houses because of a nearby hill.
The boats grounded in shallow water. The troops waded ashore and moved through soft marshy land to a cart track where they waited for the craft to return with the rest of the force.
On the beach, the provisions and ammunition were issued: food supply for twenty-four hours and thirty-six rounds of ammunition per man.
Colonel Smith whispered the order to advance, and the mass of men moved carefully in broken column along the dirt road that curved upward around a hill.
For four hours now, the tide had been coming in, washing over the marshes and flooding a small creek that the cart track crossed at a small timber bridge. But Smith was afraid that the noise of 700 men and the horses clattering over the wooden planks would be so loud it might destroy the secrecy of his mission. On his orders, the troops waded the waist-high waters of the creek.
The dirt track led to a little village that was joined to Cambridge by a lane.
Quietly, the troops passed the darkened houses and, as the road widened, formed the proper ranks for marching.
Smith had ordered six companies of the light infantry—some 200 men—to go ahead under his second-in-command, fifty-two-year-old Major John Pitcairn of the marines.
While Smith’s troops were in motion, British officers sat quietly on their horses under the trees at intervals along the roads out of Boston and Charlestown to Concord. They had ridden out from the port the previous afternoon in pairs, as though they were taking a leisurely ride in the country, as they often did. Now that it was dark, they were waiting for any express riders who, despite Gage’s precautions, might have learned of the raid.
That night, soon after eleven, while the troops were being ferried across Back Bay, two officers stationed on the road from Charlestown to Cambridge had seen a horseman galloping toward them. As they moved out from their cover to intercept him, he immediately reined back hard, swung his horse around and rode fast back the way he had come.
The two British realized what he was intending to do. He had just passed the junction where a road branched off to Medford. He could get to Concord via Medford, even though he would have to travel farther than on the Cambridge route.
Promptly, one of them rode across the triangle of land formed by the two roads to head him off. But the rider, unlike the British, knew the country. The officer’s horse sank deep to his haunches in what remained of an old drained pond.
The other officer, however, stayed on the road, riding hard after the horseman. But he was not as well mounted. The distance between them lengthened, and knowing that there were other British stationed on the road ahead of him, he checked his horse.
On Gage’s orders, other men, too, had moved with apparent innocence during daylight across the Boston Neck to the mainland: blue-coated troops of the royal artillery in light chaises, filled with the equipment for destroying cannon. Now they were waiting in the woods to join the troops on the road to Concord.
Smith’s long column of men, headed by the six light infantry companies under Major Pitcairn, was marching along the road between Cambridge and the small township of Menotomy7 through flat open country that was clearly visible in the moonlight. At Cambridge, they had met three men driving toward them on a milk wagon from Lexington and ordered them to turn their wagon and travel back with the troops the way they had come. Pitcairn was not taking any chances. They could have alerted all Cambridge as soon as the troops had passed up the road.
They had been marching for an hour when they passed through the town of Menotomy—the only sounds the regular thud of their feet in time on the hard mud of the road and the slight rattle of the bayonets in the holders on the muskets.
Pitcairn was riding at the rear of his six companies. Junior officers were at the head of the column. Two of them, Lieutenants William Sutherland and Adair, were acting as scouts, moving along unmounted on each side of the road well ahead of the troops. With them were a couple of young Tories who had come with them as guides.
Once through Menotomy, the road became a steep hill, bordered by rough stone walls, winding up through woods. In the predawn dampness, the smell of the bark of the trees hung thickly in the air.
The officers ahead of the column heard the hooves of horses approaching fast. Then Lieutenant Adair, who was ahead of the others, saw them. “There are two fellows galloping express,”8 he called out.
Sutherland—as he recorded in his report—drew his pistol and ran into the middle of the road with the guides. As the riders came down on them, he leaped for the bridle of one horse. One of the Tory guides hung on the reins of the other.
Like the men with the milk wagon, the riders were ordered to stay with the soldiers as they continued on their march, toward Lexington, the next town on the way to Concord.
An hour earlier, way ahead of the troops on the road to Concord beyond Lexington, a group of British officers on lookout duty had captured Paul Revere. His name was well known to them, and under questioning he had made no effort to conceal his identity.
In fact, he taunted them. It was then two in the morning; Revere, so he told his interrogators, had left Boston at ten. “There’ll be five hundred Americans here in a short time,” he declared, “for I’ve alarmed the country all the way up.”
This worried the interrogating officer and he rode off to report to Major Edward Mitchell, his senior, who was in a wood nearby. The major came back with him at full gallop. He dismounted drew his pistol and held it at Revere’s head. “I’m going to ask you some questions,” he said, according to Revere’s deposition, “and if you don’t give me true answers, I’ll blow your brains out.”
With obvious pleasure, Revere repeated what he had said before The country was alarmed.
So was the major. Clearly, Colonel Smith and the column tha; was then marching on the Lexington Road should be warned.
He ordered Revere to mount his horse. A sergeant took his reins, and with the other officers, they rode back along the road.
They were two miles from Lexington when they heard the musket shots. If Revere’s story was correct, these were almosi: certainly signal guns.
Anxiously, Mitchell ordered Revere off his horse, and leaving him to walk to the village on foot, the British cantered off down the road toward Lexington.
Lieutenants Sutherland and Adair, scouting ahead of the advance companies of the column as it progressed up the hill road, heard the signal guns, too.
A few minutes later they saw an officer riding toward them through the woods. It was Lieutenant William Grant of the Royal Artillery, who had gone out from Boston in daylight with the gunners in the chaises.9 He told the two lieutenants that the woods were filled with armed men, and rode back down the column to report to Pitcairn.
Soon afterward they met Major Mitchell and the officers who had taken Paul Revere. They supported what Lieutenant Grant had said. The raid was no longer a secret.
As Sutherland and Adair marched on, they stopped several American express riders. All spoke openly and triumphantly of men massing ahead of the troops on the village green at Lexington.
The numbers varied. A well-dressed American driving a sulky carriage put the figure at 600. Another said there were 1,000 men waiting in ranks on the green.
It was dawn, and a pallid light was streaking the sky. Sutherland had mounted the horse of one of the men he had intercepted. Adair was riding in an artillery chaise.
At one moment they realized that now they were more mobile they had gone too far ahead of the column. They turned and rode back along the road. On the way, in the woods in the dawnlight, they saw men moving over the hill in the direction of Lexington.
When the two young officers reached the British advance companies, they found that the column had been halted. Pitcairn, now at the head of his men, was issuing his instructions for the march through Lexington. An officer had been sent to Colonel Smith with the grenadiers farther back on the road, warning that some kind of opposition was likely. Smith, too, had heard the signal guns and, in his turn, had sent a message back to Boston.
Meanwhile, the sergeants had ordered the troops to load their muskets.10 Each soldier took a paper cartridge, containing powder and ball, from the cartridge box on his belt, tipped a little powder into the flashpan above the trigger and, holding the musket butt down on the road, poured the remainder of the contents of the cartridge down the barrel. Then, taking the ramrod from its holder on the gun, he rammed the powder tight.
It was a cumbersome operation, but British troops were well drilled in the use of muskets. All of them could fire three rounds a minute, and the brighter men could nearly double that rate.
Pitcairn re-formed the column in case of ambush: a small advance guard to go ahead, flankers in the woods on each side. Then, riding at the head of the main body, he gave the order to march the remaining half mile to Lexington.
As the British swung down the hill, Lexington’s tall three-story timber meetinghouse came in sight. It stood dominating the opening formed by the trees at the end of the road, on the near corner of the triangular green at the fork of two roads—one that led on to Bedford and another that veered left to Concord.
The advance company, with Sutherland and Adair leading, neared the meetinghouse. Beyond it on the green they could see the ranks of men waiting for them. They wore no uniforms—just the leather jerkins and broad-brimmed hats that country people always wore—but they were armed, and a militia officer stood alone in front of them. At the edge of the green, also waiting, was a large crowd, watching tensely.
Although the road to Concord lay to the left, the advance company marched straight on past the meetinghouse and halted beside the green. Suddenly, a man moved out from the crowd, aimed a gun at Sutherland and fired—but the musket merely clicked as the powder flashed in the pan.11
The lieutenant swore at him, but conscious of the explosive situation, he did not retaliate—just turned his horse and cantered back to report to Pitcairn, riding at the head of the approaching column.
Pitcairn was now near enough to assess the situation, and he decided how to handle it. He could hardly march on to Concord leaving armed men formed up for conflict in his rear. On the other hand, if he acted carefully, he could possibly avoid any shooting.
“Don’t let the soldiers open fire,” he ordered his officers. “Have them form—and surround them.”12
The British wheeled onto the green past the meetinghouse, moving parallel with the ranks of militia who stood waiting for them. Then they halted and turned to face the Americans.
Pitcairn rode around the other side of the meetinghouse and stationed himself at the end of the space between the two big bodies of men, eyeing each other tautly.
“Lay down your arms, you damned rebels,” he ordered the militia, “and disperse!”
For a moment, nothing happened. Then slowly and reluctantly the men of the militia broke ranks and began to amble toward the outbuildings of the Buckman Tavern—an old inn with two crooked chimneys across the road. But none of them dropped his gun.
Pitcairn rode closer to the retreating men. “Lay down your arms!” he repeated. “Damn you, lay down your arms!”
It was at this moment that the first shot in the American Revolution was fired. No one knows for sure who fired it. According to most British eyewitnesses, it came from the direction of the Buckman Tavern. Whoever fired from whatever direction, it started a war.
The soldiers reacted to it as though it were a signal. For months they had been forced to endure insults from provincials in Boston. Now their frustration seemed to erupt. Without any orders13 they raised their muskets to their shoulders and fired; then they charged, yelling as they went.
By this time most of the American militia were on the edge of the green. Some of them swung around and started shooting at the charging soldiers. Others made for the tavern. A few leaped behind the cover of a stone wall near the inn and fired from there.
Furiously, Pitcairn yelled at the troops to stop firing and re-form their ranks. But none of them obeyed him. “The men were so wild,” recorded Lieutenant John Barker later, “that they could hear no orders.”
The major spurred his horse in among his men, shouting at them to fall back and jabbing his sword downward in the cease-fire signal. But it had no effect. The troops were intent on slaughter.
Farther back toward Menotomy, burly Colonel Smith, riding at the rear of his grenadiers, heard the shooting and drove his panting horse down the side of the road, past the column of marching men, onto Lexington Green. By now some of the British were trying to break down the tavern door. If they succeeded, as their officers knew only too well, there would be a bayonet massacre in the crowded inn.
Smith was horrified by the chaos he saw. “Where’s a drummer?” he snapped at Sutherland.14
The lieutenant rode through the yelling soldiers and found a drummer boy. It was only then, as they heard the pounding orders of the drum, that the troops at last began to obey their angry officers and formed up again in ranks on the green.
By then there was not an American in sight . . . except for eight dead men lying awkwardly on the grass. The only British casualty was a soldier wounded in the leg—and a horse, nicked in the flank.
One by one, the companies filed off the green onto the Concord road and, now that there was no need for silence, marched to the music of a drum and fife band.
As before, Pitcairn and the light infantry led the column. The grenadiers, in tall bearskin hats, followed. They were all big, broad-shouldered men, for the grenades that they had once been trained to hurl were heavy. And although grenades were no longer in current use in the army, the tradition for enlisting husky recruits had lingered on. They were an elite corps, normally employed on the flanks in battle formations.
The road was deserted. For an hour, as they marched, they passed nobody—no wagons, no farmers. There was no sign of anyone in the fields, not even any women by the houses. After the confrontation on the crowded green at Lexington, the quiet was ominous. A horseman was spotted on a nearby hill. He sat still, watching them, then galloped away.
They marched past Lincoln—the road skirted the edge of the town—and on down the long wooded hill toward the groups of clapboard houses, ranged on each side of a curving river, that formed the township of Concord.
It was then they saw the militia—several hundred men moving toward them up the road in a long column that was still curling out of the town.
For a few minutes, the two columns continued to approach each other. At last, the militia halted, then turned about and moved back into the town ahead of the advancing British.
The purpose of this little show of strength was not clear to Smith or Pitcairn, but it warned them that there was an organized opposition in Concord of some size.
Concord was cradled under steep hills, and a high ridge overlooked the road where it joined the outskirts of the town. On these heights, groups of men with guns were clearly visible. From here, they could fire from cover onto the British on the road.
Smith ordered some of the light infantry up onto the hills to clear them. There was no conflict. As soon as the provincials saw the red-coated soldiers coming up toward them, they retreated and moved down through the town.
Gage’s plan was running several hours behind schedule, but he had worked it out carefully. When the column halted in Concord, Colonel Smith ordered contingents of troops onto the bridges to the north and south of the town to hold off any Americans who might converge on Concord from the neighboring country, as they had in an incident at Cambridge during the fall.
Then the grenadiers, directed by officers using the intelligence map that Smith had brought with him, began their search for supplies. Cannon were dug up from their burial place in the courtyard of the jail and broken into uselessness. Gun carriages were burned. Ammunition and flour, stored for the militia, were thrown into the town pond.
Meanwhile, a crisis was growing at the North Bridge. There Captain Lawrence Parsons had been put in command of severe companies. His orders were to hold the bridge, and also to lead a party two miles farther along the road to raid the farm of the militia Colonel James Barrett. Gage’s spy had reported it as the site of one of the biggest arms dumps in the area.
But as soon as the British troops approached the bridge, they saw across the river on a hill to their left the entire militia force of several hundred men that had marched out earlier toward them along the road from the town.
On the hills stretching miles behind them were many groups of approaching men—called out presumably from neighboring towns.
Carefully, Parsons posted two companies, between sixty and seventy men, on a hill to his right to cover the road, left one company to hold the bridge, and marched off to the Barrett farm with the rest of his men.
His troops were still in sight, with the dust swirling behind them, when the militia began to move in a long column from their position on the hill down the half mile of country lane that joined the road about 200 yards from the bridge.
There were, in fact, 400 of them, and their steady progress, to the thumping of a band, was watched uneasily by the 38 British soldiers at the river who were there to stop them. After a few moments, Captain Walter Laurie, who was in charge at the bridge, sent an officer galloping back into the town to ask the colonel for reinforcements.
On the hillside opposite, the officers of the two companies stationed there to cover the road also eyed the long orderly column of farming men as it snaked slowly down the country lane and wondered what they ought to do. Over to their left, in the town, they could see smoke curling skyward from the fires that the grenadiers had made of the gun carriages.
At last, Lieutenant Waldron Kelly, in command of the covering party, decided to move his men back to the river ahead of the approaching militia. This would give Laurie about 100 soldiers at the bridge—enough to stand a fair chance of holding it, despite the fact that they were heavily outnumbered. There was plenty of cover provided by the stone walls that bordered the fields near the river.
At the bridge, Captain Laurie decided that despite his orders to hold the position, his little force was too small to challenge so large a number of men if they made a serious attempt to cross the river. So he formed his soldiers in column, hoping presumably that the sight of them would be enough to cause the Americans to halt. If not, he had given orders for tactical withdrawal—slowly, backwards, with each rank at the front firing before doubling to the rear.
The plan did not work. The American column did not halt. As it neared the bridge, someone started shooting—although, as at Lexington, no one knows exactly who first pulled the trigger. Within seconds, everyone was firing. Two British soldiers died, and several fell wounded in the first volley.
The troops, conscious of their exposed position, turned and fled “despite,” as Laurie reported later, “of all that could be done to prevent them.” As they reached the nearest houses, they met the reinforcements that Laurie had sent for.
But the Americans, having taken the bridge, were not pressing them. The British formed in ranks and marched to the town square.
When Captain Parsons and his men returned from the Barrett farm, the militiamen had dispersed. All that remained at the bridge were the bodies of the British soldiers. The head of one of them had been bared bloodily to the skull—apparent evidence to his horrified comrades that he had been scalped.15
By now Lord Percy, with his relief column of the First Brigade and his two cannon, had been marching from Boston on the road to Lexington for an hour. At Cambridge, he had been checked because the planks of the bridge over the Charles River had been taken up. But since the timbers were piled nearby, the halt was not too long. Only the heavy supply wagons at the rear of his column were held up while the bridge was fully repaired, and Percy did not wait for them.
In Concord, at noon, Colonel Smith gave the orders for his troops to start the 18-mile march home. Some of the more seriously wounded were left with local doctors in the town. The rest limped along with the troops or hung on the stirrup leathers of horses. Lieutenant Sutherland, shot in the shoulder during the action at the North Bridge, traveled in a chaise.
As the column moved out of the town, Smith sent out flankers of the light infantry up onto the ridge of hills, now on his left, which he had cleared of provincials on his way into Concord that morning, and also onto the far side of a meadow on his right. The flanking troops met no Americans.
A few hundred yards along the Lexington road, the hill sloped down to a small bridge over a stream. The road beyond climbed gently toward Lincoln half a mile away. On either side fields, with scattered clumps of trees and stone walls, sloped upward from the road.
As the column approached the little bridge, the flankers moved back onto the highway to cross the stream with the main column. It was then that they saw the provincials who were waiting for them on the hillside on their right—“a vast number of armed men,” as Sutherland described it graphically, “drawn out in battalia order, I dare say near a thousand were approaching through the trees. . . .”
He saw “a much larger body drawn up to my left. . . .” The column of red-coated soldiers bunched to cross the little bridge. Then the shots cracked out in sharp irregular succession like the noise of burning wood. Within seconds several men in the forward companies lay dead and wounded on the road, and the men who followed in the long column had to step over the bodies or drag them to the side so that the chaises could get across the bridge.
The troops, shocked and surprised, stopped and fired back, but by then their targets had taken cover behind stone walls and trees and were not exposed, except at very long distance.
The officers urged the men on so that they could get the flankers over the bridge and out into the fields to force the nearest Americans to give ground near the roadway and lengthen their range and enable the column, pinched tight at the bridge, to open ranks and make themselves harder to hit.
This, as the soldiers were soon to discover, was not an isolated attack at the bridge. Along the road Americans were taking up station, hiding waiting for them. Almost invariably clumps of trees or houses or boulders near the road meant bursts of fire from men concealed behind them, infuriating the troops, for this was dirty conflict. These were methods of men who were afraid to stand up and fight, who thought nothing of shooting soldiers in the back. The troops who suffered worst were in the rear. Unlike the men at the front, who soon moved farther up the road into longer range than their marching comrades behind them, these remained as a focus of marksmen, who, as soon as the British had passed, left their cover and pursued, shooting as they came.
The progress of the column, under continuing fire from the unseen gunmen, was slow. Repeatedly, the angry men had to stop to load their muskets—fifteen to twenty seconds when they were not moving forward, when they were easy standing targets.
As they neared the top of the hill toward Lincoln, the trees fringed the highway, and all along, on both sides, the muskets cracked.
The flanking parties did their best, vaulting the stone walls, coming up behind the provincials, lurking behind trees; but the numbers of Americans who had swarmed toward Concord from the neighboring towns was now in the thousands, and the flankers themselves were often closer targets than the battered column moving painfully along the road, under fire from all sides.
The front companies reached the top of the hill on the edge of Lincoln Township. The hilltops were favored by the Americans. Here, the staccato noise of the firing grew as the soldiers moved into range of more waiting men.
There were two more hilltops for the troops to brave before they even reached Lexington, where, after the killing of that morning, they could expect to face very heavy pressure.
On the column went, leaving its trail of supine figures, enclosing its wounded in the middle of its ranks, jerking like a giant red caterpillar as companies stopped to fire and load before moving forward once again. Down to the bottom of the hill, across another stream and along the curving road toward a point where thick forest land edged the highway on both sides.
It was an obvious place for concentrated force, ideal for the sneak fighting techniques the provincials were using. The front companies were checked while the flankers went ahead to clear it. They only partly succeeded, and as the column entered the shadows thrown across the road by the dense trees on either side, a hail of bullets spattered into the column. Again, they stopped and fired, but again they were firing at opponents they could not see, for their attackers lay down to load.
Still the soldiers held their ranks, but they were more ragged now. They were tired, too. They had had no sleep the night before. They had marched more than 20 miles since two o’clock the previous morning. They were in no fit state to fight any kind of action—let alone endure a buffeting as punishing as they were now suffering.
Then they were clear of the stretch of forest. For a wonderful mile, they marched through open country with few trees and no walls to provide cover for the local musketmen. For a few minutes, they had a breathing space while they were not under attack, and the officers had their first real chance to attempt to mold disciplined order on the tattered ranks.
It was their last respite. The country ahead of them was full of natural danger—a roadside farmhouse, which, they had now learned, always concealed several gunmen and, on the hillside, large boulders big enough to provide ample cover for a group of aiming men.
The shots rang out again. The house and the boulders concealed all the guns they had feared. More men died. More were left wounded in the road. More clung to horses—some of them relinquished by officers who had now discovered that they made prominent targets on horseback—or lay slouched on the animals’ backs, held in place by their comrades.
Past another house—and another shattering blast of fire. Over another hilltop. Then worse, under a high rocky ledge from which the provincials poured down an incessant cannonade.
The troops were near breaking point. Most of them had now fired the last of the thirty-six rounds of ammunition they had been issued on the moonlight night that seemed so long ago. They quickened their pace. Then some of them began to run. The ranks broke. They ceased being even a ragged column. They were a mob, gripped by panic.
Frantically, the officers ordered them to check and form in two ranks, but they were ignored. Major Pitcairn, seeing what was happening in the forward companies, galloped his horse to the head of the column. Suddenly, it shied at a musket shot and reared up. The major lost his balance and toppled from his saddle onto the road.
And the men ran on—up over the last hill to Lexington, still under heavy fire. The flankers, exhausted from climbing walls and moving through the rough country off the road, had virtually ceased to have any effect, and the American gunmen were moving closer to the roadside.
Still, the officers were trying to stop the running men and force them into some kind of order; but fear was now the main motivation, and they barely heard the orders. At last, a group of officers raced ahead of their troops, turned to threaten them with their bayonets, and forced them to halt. “We told them,” reported Ensign Henry de Berniere, “that if they advanced they should die. . . . Upon this they began to form under very heavy fire.”
Lexington was now less than a mile away, and the leading companies could see the village some 80 feet below them as they moved down the hill toward it.
The wounded Sutherland in his chaise was at the rear of the column. Suddenly, he heard “the soldiers call out that there was a vast number in their rear.” Looking behind, he saw “about 2,000 men” marching down the hill after them, firing as they came.
At last, beyond Lexington Village, the forward ranks saw three firm lines of waiting red-coated soldiers, formed across the Boston road. It was Lord Percy’s First Brigade. The sight to the worn and harassed men was overwhelming. A burst of cheering broke out a1 the front of the column and rippled back through the long lines oi desperate soldiers.
As the first of Smith’s men reached Percy’s waiting troops, the ranks opened to allow them through. The weary men sprawled on the grass near an inn called Munroe’s Tavern that Percy had commandeered as his headquarters.
He had ranged his troops, facing outward, in a large rectangle, enclosing a stretch of the road, the tavern and several houses neai it, so that they were prepared to fight off attacks from any direction.
On each of the small hills on each side of the road, overlooking Lexington, he had mounted his cannon. As the pursuers of Smith’s column followed the harassed British down the road from Concord, they had joined other waiting Americans on the green. It was a big crowd of elated men, and Percy decided that a gesture was needed. One of the cannon flashed with a loud explosion—and a 6-pound ball smashed through the wall of the meetinghouse, Instantly, the crowd cleared; men ran for the sides of the green, taking cover by the buildings and the stone walls.
Percy allowed the tired soldiers from Concord half an hour to recover. The wounded were tended in the tavern. In another room, the earl talked over plans for the march to Boston with Smith and Pitcairn and his officers. When he learned of the way the Americans had used roadside homes as concentrated shooting posts, he ordered the burning of the houses near the tavern.
At three forty-five the 1,800 men began their march to Boston. Smith had emphasized that the biggest casualties they had suffered on the way from Concord had been at the rear and middle of the column. So his weary divisions were positioned at the front. The fresher troops, who had come out from Boston that morning, were used on the flanks and to form the rear guard, which was changed regularly.
“Before the column had advanced a mile along the road,” wrote Lieutenant Mackenzie, who was with the first troops to be assigned to the rear guard, “we were fired at from all quarters, but particularly from houses at the roadside and the adjacent stone walls. . . .”
It was the same story as before, but this time the Americans were using their Indian-fighting techniques that would have been branded as dishonorable in any European battle against fresh troops who were appalled at the slaughter of their comrades. As a result, these angry soldiers rushed house after house, killing everyone they could find inside.
The flankers, too, once they realized the pattern, were moving ahead of the column clearing the houses of snipers. In one house they shot to death seven men who were waiting with guns.
Whenever the army of provincials who were following pressed too close on the rear guards, as they did on the steep woodland hill that led down to Menotomy, Percy ordered his cannon to be galloped onto the nearest piece of high ground and opened fire. Always, this forced the Americans to keep their distance.
As the long day wore on, the number of British wounded grew. They rode on the gun carriages when they were not in action, then flopped off onto the road whenever the cannon were ordered into action. The wounded Ensign Jeremy Lister had acquired a horse, which he was using as cover, walking on the side that was farthest from the shooting. Nearby, another horse, with a wounded man on its back and three others clinging to its leathers, was shot, and all collapsed in the road in a heap. They begged Lister for his mount, and he agreed willingly.*
As the long column approached Cambridge, the fighting grew hotter. The new flanking troops were tiring, and owing to the rough nature of the country, they were being forced to work nearer to the road than before; this meant that the provincials could shoot at shorter range. At the same time the Americans, who had been streaming into Cambridge all day, were assembling ahead in greater numbers than the British had yet encountered.
Cambridge was a key point. For there Lord Percy, miraculously unhurt on his white horse, could choose two routes back to Boston. Either he could march back the way he had come out that morning—crossing the Charles River by the bridge that his men had repaired—or he could fork left for Charlestown and, relying on the navy to cover his retreat, send his troops over the water to Boston by boat.
For the first time since the confrontation that morning at Lexington, the British approaching the Charlestown crossroads found the Americans facing them openly in ranks. They were formed across the Charlestown road, and Percy realized that their purpose was to force him to return to Boston by the same route he had taken that morning—and this time clearly the bridge would have been completely demolished. So it was obvious to him that they had to go to Charlestown.
He checked the column. Once more, the wounded slid off the gun carriages, and the cannon were driven forward past the ranks of waiting soldiers to the front.
As usual, the crash of the guns had its daunting effect. The Americans broke ranks, and the British marched on down the Charlestown road under constant heavy attack from the rear by crowds of men chanting, “Hancock! Hancock! Hancock forever!”
By the time they were approaching the narrow neck that connected the mainland to the Charlestown peninsula it was dusk. But shooting was still coming from the few houses that lay ahead. Wearily, a party of soldiers went into the buildings to clear them of the snipers. The last man they killed, according to British records, was a Negro.
Then they marched across the neck, and for the first time since they had left Lexington, they were no longer under fire. Their pursuers stayed on the mainland.
Percy, however, was not taking any chances. They could always make a rush attack. Also, he did not know what he might expect from the inhabitants of Charlestown. So he gave orders for the column to march on up the easy slope of Bunker Hill and prepare to defend the high position. It was a strong one, for from there he could overlook both the Charlestown Neck and the town.
At Province House, Gage had known the full story by four o’clock, when his aide-de-camp, who had ridden out with Percy and turned back at Lexington, managed at last to get to Boston by a cross-country route after repeated stops to avoid the assembling Americans. Promptly the general had sent a curt warning to the Boston selectmen that if any more armed men left Boston to oppose the King’s troops, the most disagreeable consequences could be expected. Then Admiral Graves was alerted to have his boats ready for a ferrying operation if Percy marched to Charlestown.
With the 74-gun Somerset at anchor with its gunports open only a quarter of a mile off the little town, the British did not anticipate much trouble from its inhabitants. And as soon as Percy arrived on the peninsula, the Charlestown selectmen delivered an urgent message to him assuring him that his soldiers could march through the town unharmed on their way to Boston.
Gage sent over new troops to man the defense posts that Percy’s hard-pressed force had set up on the northern slopes of Bunker Hill facing the mainland. Engineers began to strengthen the fortifications that the tired and battered men had begun.
Meanwhile, now that they were safe from the persistent American gunning and covered by fresh troops, what remained of their organized discipline collapsed. The hillside became a scene of chaos. Hundreds of soldiers milled around in the darkness. Some units were ordered to the town hall to wait for evacuation. Others stayed, uncertain what to do, in the fields on the outskirts of Charlestown.
A sergeant approached the wounded Ensign Lister, explained that he had twelve men, and could not find any other officer. Lister told him “that he would have to do the best he could because, since I was wounded, it was not in my power to be the smallest use.” The ensign went on down to the waterfront, where he found Captain Parsons, who had been in charge of the British companies at Concord’s North Bridge, “in a worse situation” than himself and young Sutherland complaining he was in violent pain.
Slowly, the British were evacuated, the wounded being given priority in the boats, across the water to Boston. It was after midnight when the last of the troops who had marched out on what had been designed as a simple raid, had returned wearily to their barracks.
In twenty-four hours, the situation in Massachusetts had changed out of all recognition. The clash that had been expected so long had been traumatically different from what anyone in the army would have forecast. For the British it had been a disastrous day: 273 casualties, many of them wounded, but as always, many of the maimed would soon die in hospital.
Even though it indicated that much of the American shooting had been wide, it was an appalling total, considering the quality of the soldiers—most of them from the best fighting units in the British army—and the nature of their attackers: farm men, largely ungeneraled and uncoordinated.
Although the shame became blurred and excused by time, the action produced a sharp change in the British attitude to the Americans. “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will be much mistaken,” Lord Percy wrote privately to London. “They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as rangers among the Indians. . . . Nor are several of the men void of a spirit of enthusiasm . . . for many of them . . . advanced within ten yards to fire at me and other officers, though they were mortally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant.”
His new and grudging admiration, however, was tempered by his disgust, expressed in his official report, “at the cruelty and barbarity of the rebels who scalped and cut off the ears of the wounded men that fell into their hands.”16
2
That night, while the rescue operation was in progress between Charlestown and Boston, Gage was in conference at Province House with Admiral Graves.
The admiral urged the immediate burning of Roxbury and Charlestown and the fortifying of the two hills that overlooked Boston—Bunker Hill to the north and Nook’s Hill near Dorchester on the mainland to the south. But Gage, conscious of his mauled and limited forces, decided as always to play for time. He persuaded his belligerent admiral to confine himself to threats.
The next day the selectmen at Charlestown and Marblehead, which acted as a port for Salem, were warned by naval captains that if they allowed rebel forces to occupy them, they would be set on fire immediately.
Meanwhile, the British prepared for siege. The rebels, who had pursued Percy’s column from Concord, had stayed where they stopped at Prospect Hill on the mainland across the causeway from Charlestown. Others had occupied Roxbury, the suburb on the other side of the neck from Boston. Several thousand were at Cambridge, which was the headquarters of the army that was now in the process of formal organization, soon to be sanctioned once again by a resolve of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.
Gage ordered the lines closed by the battery at the neck and intensive fortification. The men-of-war were hauled in close on all sides of town so that their guns could be used for defense against an attack from Roxbury. In Back Bay, where the water was too shallow for ships, flatboats, each with a 6-pound cannon fitted in the bows, were on constant patrol. Admiral Graves landed four big 24-pounders from his ships and employed his sailors to set up a battery on Copp’s Hill, which dominated the water, and some of his anchorage between Boston and Charlestown.
By this time Gage, pursuing a policy of concentrating his force, had called back the troops who had relieved Percy’s men on Bunker Hill. Although the exposed detachment could have found itself in a vulnerable position, this was a decision that Gage was to regret.
Formal news of the battle of April 19 was rushed to all the colonies by rebel express riders and by a fast ship to England. Signed by Dr. Joseph Warren, a Boston physician who was now president of the Provincial Congress, the account described the British actions during the day in lurid terms, mixing facts with fiction and providing little suggestion of British soldiers in full retreat. “Women in childbed were driven by the soldiery naked into the streets, old men peaceably in their houses were shot dead, and such scenes exhibited as would disgrace the annals of the most uncivilised nations.”
Appealing to all Americans, Warren asserted: “The barbarous murders committed on our innocent brethren on Wednesday the 19th instant have made it absolutely necessary that we immediately raise an army to defend our wives and children from the butchering hands of an inhuman soldiery. . . .”
It was a deliberate, provocative, false report of what had happened, almost certainly drafted by Samuel Adams, but its impact on an appalled America was traumatic. It was the call to arms—a challenge to every colonist to rally around Massachusetts in its stand against tyranny. The years of talking about resistance to slavery, of “no taxation without representation” were over. Now the issue was to be fought out in the battlefield.
Although Gage was besieged in Boston, reports of the developing situation reached him very fast. Volunteers were soon marching to Massachusetts from all over America to enlist for 40 shillings a month in the full-time army that was temporarily under the control of the Provincial Congress until the Continental Congress, due to meet in Philadelphia on May 10, made other arrangements. The Provincial Congress, then sitting at Concord, was proceeding with plans to issue its own currency.
Gage, alarmed by Joseph Warren’s highly colored allegations of the battle, sent a circular to all the governors of the American colonies with a more sober account of the day. But as always, the Faction’s presentation and its speedy action had made a big impact. In fact, one of the governors was as rebellious as the subjects he ruled in the name of the King.
From Connecticut came an angry letter from Governor Jonathan Trumbull accusing Gage of a “most unprovoked attack upon the lives and property of His Majesty’s subjects” and of “such outrages . . . as would disgrace barbarians.” Gage denied this sharply, but his arguments did not convince Trumbull. The government of Connecticut put an embargo on any provisions, destined for Boston, in the colony’s ports. So too, Gage soon learned, did the government of Rhode Island.
In New York and Pennsylvania the Committees of Correspondence ordered similar bans on supplies for the troops. They were not supported officially, but it no longer made much practical difference. After Warren’s shock report on Lexington and Concord, the effective power of the committees had grown much greater. Their edicts produced the same result.
Even in New York, whose governor, in common with many of its inhabitants, was strongly Tory, the first news of the battle had sparked off a riot.
A dispatch reached Boston from Governor Josiah Martin of North Carolina. The people of the province had put his home under day and night surveillance while he was “not supported by a single man.” From Williamsburg came a panic call from Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore; he was in refuge with his family in HMS Fowey, anchored in the harbor.
In Massachusetts, at the eye of the crisis, the conflict was focused temporarily on the issue of food supplies for Boston. For the newly enlisted rebel army-now some 15,000 strong under the command of General Artemas Ward-had taken over from the militia and was entrenched in a semicircular blockade of the causeways of both Boston and Charlestown.
By now all the thirteen colonies—either by government decree or through the action of their revolutionaries—were closed as sources of supply.
Apart from Europe, Canada was the only province available to the provision ships, and all along the New England coast, American privateers were lying in wait, hoping to seize them before the British frigates, sent out by Admiral Graves in response to this new threat, could provide protection.
Within the harbor itself, the islands were a scene of regular skirmishes between troops sent out on foraging missions and rebel forces who moved to stop them.
The British in Boston, waiting tensely for the big reinforcements promised by Dartmouth, were forced onto emergency rations. There was not even hay for the horses, which were being fed on Indian corn.
Then, halfway through May, Gage received news so bad that he could hardly credit it, in a letter from Dr. Joseph Warren that a British agent had intercepted. American forces had stormed the British fort at Ticonderoga.
Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, was the key defense bastion on the northern border of the province of New York. It controlled the main waterway to America from Canada. Worse, the fortress had fallen without a single gun’s being fired in its defense.
General Gage was unprepared for almost every event that overtook him, but he had foreseen this particular danger. The fort had been repaired and regarrisoned but, it now seemed, poorly officered.
The rebels had advanced up Lake Champlain, attacked another fort at Crown Point, and sent raiding parties into the little town of St. Johns on the Richelieu River at the northern end of the lake. In this one fast coup, the Americans had completely wiped out their extreme shortage of artillery, for they had captured no less than 200 British field guns.
Clearly, in retrospect, Gage should now have taken the hills that dominated the Boston peninsula both to the north and the south before the rebels could bring down their captured guns from Ticonderoga. But as British generals often were, he was obsessed by the need to concentrate his limited forces.
Soon they were not quite so limited. The three major generals the King had appointed to support him arrived at the port with a reinforcement of 1,500 men.
The generals were all able men, even though they each had their faults. Howe had gained most of his experience in America in the Seven Years’ War. Burgoyne had won his campaign accolades in Portugal. But Clinton, the youngest of the three, had fought alongside Frederick the Great’s Prussians against the coalition of France, Austria and Russia. It was the same war that Howe had been fighting across the Atlantic, but the officers of the “German school” considered themselves the elite of the army. “Oh my dear boy,” exclaimed Clinton’s close and ebullient friend William Phillips, who was to serve later with Burgoyne in the famous march to Saratoga, “the last war made men! But it was only in one part of the world, Germany. . . .”
So Clinton, fair-haired with a vaguely boyish look about him despite his forty-five years, regarded his two superior generals with a slightly superior attitude that soon developed into harping criticism. In contrast with the amiable and popular Burgoyne, he was at best a remote man, who drank sparingly and did not socialize easily in the mess. Howe, too, though quiet with a tendency to brood, enjoyed high living: cards, women, drinking.
At Province House in Boston, Gage discussed plans to attack their besiegers with his three new generals, but three weeks passed after their arrival before a scheme was settled. The army—so Howe reported on June 12—was planning to attack Dorchester, to the south of Boston, and then to strike fast at the rebel positions at Roxbury and Cambridge.
The British commanders were confident that their attack would be decisive. There was little doubt that, under formal battle conditions, professional British troops, who had proved themselves superior to the French and the Austrian armies, could rout an untrained opposition of New England farmers, even though numerically superior.
Lexington and Concord were not forgotten, but the conditions of the day—and the need to retreat under such sudden assault for so long a distance through country so suited to the sneak rebel techniques—were regarded as exceptional. It seemed unlikely to most of the senior officers in Boston that anything similar could happen again during a planned attack. Lord Percy was not quite so confident, though now that there were so many generals in the port, he was fairly junior in the rank hierarchy. Clinton, too, did not share the general attitude of easy optimism, but then Clinton was a worrier.
Clinton17 was worrying as usual on the night of June 16. The British attack on Dorchester was scheduled for two days later.
Although he wrote fully about what he heard on that warm summer evening, he did not record his exact movements. Probably he took a walk along the harbor or strolled up Copp’s Hill, where Admiral Graves, nervous of the heights across the water behind Charlestown, had set up his battery of big naval guns.
From there, Clinton would have seen the warships, dark masted silhouettes marked by their riding lights, swinging gently on their cables in the harbor below him: Lively, Falcon, Cerebus, Glasgow, Symmetry and the big Somerset, with its three tiers of guns, which that day had been moved into deeper water because Graves was nervous about the limited maneuverability in the shallow channel off Charlestown.
Either from the hill or the wharves, Clinton heard in the night stillness the sounds across the water, as the rebels with spades and picks fortified the peak of Breed’s Hill, which loomed just behind Charlestown.
Clinton walked back to his quarters and told Howe, the most senior of the three major generals who had just arrived, of his suspicions. But Howe was enjoying his evening and felt disinclined to follow Clinton’s suggestion that they should make a dawn attack.
Even Gage, whom Clinton then called on with the news, did not react warmly. Clinton recorded: “I have given in a proposal in writing. If we were of active disposition, we should be landed tomorrow at daybreak. As it is, I fear it must be postponed until two.” Two o’clock the following afternoon was the next high tide.
So the generals went to bed.
They were awakened early—by the repeated explosions echoing and reechoing between the hills around Boston Harbor, as the ten port guns of the Lively opened up on the hilltop works that had been revealed by the morning sun. The achievement of the rebels during the few hours of darkness was fantastic. They had built a redoubt—an ultrastrong defense position made of thick walls of earth and stone, standing 6 feet high. The front of the fortification, as the Lively’s captain could see through his glass, was some 50 yards long.
The teams of rebel diggers were still working hard, and the redoubt was only partly finished. The exact form it was planned to take finally was not yet clear from that distance, but obviously it would be big enough to hold several hundred men who would dominate the steep slopes on all sides up which any assault on the position would have to be mounted.
Admiral Graves, in his house near the seafront, was also roused by the repeated salvos of the Lively. Angrily, he sent off a boat with irritated instructions to the Lively to cease firing without orders. But when he, too, peered through his glass at the redoubt that had appeared on the hill, he issued new orders: All ships within range were to bombard the rebel position.
Slowly, as the crews ran springs through the stern ports to the anchor cables, the warships swung around and steadied broadside to the hill. Within half an hour more than 100 guns were firing at the redoubt. Soon, too, the big 24-pounders in the battery on Copp’s Hill had opened up at a range of nearly half a mile.
In fact, the ship’s gunners, unlike the teams on Copp’s Hill, could not elevate their cannon high enough to strike the hilltop, but the psychological effect of the heavy bombardment on the rebels, working desperately to complete the fortification before the British attacked, was clearly daunting. Several rebel officers were seen standing bravely on the walls—presumably to give courage by example to the men striving with the entrenching tools.
At Province House, Gage held a council of war. Clinton—zealous, touchy, disliked by the others—had foreseen the danger and had studied the terrain. Inevitably, as he always did, he had a plan. They should land a few hundred men immediately in Charlestown and take the lower part of Bunker Hill by the causeway to the mainland. Ships could be brought up on either side to ensure at close range that no more rebels crossed the narrow strip of land. They could then either attack the redoubt from the rear before it was completed or starve the men on the hill at their leisure.
Promptly, Gage objected on military principles: British troops would be between two enemy forces, one of which was numerous and the other in a strong strategic position.
Howe was the key figure at that meeting. As the senior of the three major generals, he would command the attack. He was a strange man—very tall, dark, brooding with thick eyebrows, ample black hair and a rather wide nose that gave a coarseness to features that were otherwise handsome. He was a skilled commander, as he had demonstrated in the ascent of the Plains of Abraham in Wolfe’s attack on Quebec. And he was brave. But always he was unhurried.
Howe sided with Gage against Clinton’s suggestion. Apart from military principle—which all British generals had to observe, for the shadow of a court of inquiry was everpresent—the plan was unspectacular and untidy. It could take time to complete.
Instead, a formal attack was planned: a slow approach from the front to concentrate the rebels’ attention, backed up by a fast sudden assault from the flank which would do the real damage.
The orders were issued: Fifteen hundred men were to be landed by the navy at high tide on Moulton Point on the east corner of the Charlestown peninsula. Eight field guns and four howitzers were to accompany the troops.
Clinton was deeply disturbed by the plan. “The general idea,” he recorded, “was that . . . it would easily be carried.” He did not believe that the others had bothered to study the facts. The hill was steeper than they appeared to think. The redoubt would not be open at the rear as they seemed to expect—at least not by the time of the attack, when the rebels would have put in several more hours of work—and behind it was a lane buttressed by stone walls, excellent additional cover for men who had already shown they could shoot.
But the doubts of the gloomy general were discounted by Howe and his staff officers present at the conference. In fact, they planned to make the assault the first stage of the original attack designed to take the country surrounding Boston, only to take Charlestown first instead of last, as they had intended before the rebels’ night operation. The soldiers were ordered to take blankets and provisions.
Truly, it was not Clinton’s concern; he was there by courtesy, as an adviser since he and Burgoyne were not needed. It was suggested they might care to occupy their time by directing the guns on Copp’s Hill.
REFERENCES to the PLANS
No. 1
A 10 Companies of Grenadiers, 10 Detachments of Light Infantry, 2 Battalions in 3 Lines
B 1st Detachment behind a Stone Wall
C Light Infantry moved forward covered by a break in the Ground
D The Battalion moved forward from the Stone Wall, and joined by another from the line being covered by the rising of the Hill from the Fire of the Redoubt
E.F A Hedge being part of the Enemy’s Defences only Musket proof
G Redoubt & lntrenchment proof against our Field Pieces
H 1st Situation of our Field Pieces with the direction of their Fire
I.F Fire of the Artillery against the Hedge F. to cover the Attack upon their Left
K The Order our Troops would probably have Attacked in, had our Light Infantry been able to penetrate
No. 2
L Light Infantry advancing to the Attack of the Point
M.M Grenadiers taking Ground to the Left of the Light Infantry which had not been able to force the Enemy
N The principal Fire of the Artillery was directed from this Point against the Hedge F.
O.O The 43d and 52d Regiments after having inclined to the Left to leave an Interval for the Artillery
P.P The 5th & 38th Regiments
Q.Q The 47th Regiment & Battalion of Marines disembarked near the Right of Charles Town, after it was Evacuated & assisted in the Reduction of the Redoubt.
Note: The part R was first forced by the Grenadiers & Regiments immediately opposite to it, which had for some time formed one Line in order to return the Enemy’s Fire.
The History of the Origins of the American War by Charles Stedman, 1794
3
At eleven thirty, with the guns still thundering a barrage, twenty-eight boats filled with British soldiers left Boston’s Long Wharf and moved slowly south in two long lines toward Moulton Point. It was a hot brilliant day. The sun flashed from the bayonets and highlighted the vivid scarlet of the uniforms against the deep blue of the harbor water. Thousands of spectators on the rooftops and hills of Boston and from the high ground of Charlestown were watching that double column of craft as, oars jerking in unison, it moved steadily westward.
The noise of the cannon grew to a new intensity as another battery added to the noise: Under the command of Lord Percy, the big guns on Boston Neck, which Gage had set up the previous summer against so much opposition from the selectmen, started a heavy bombardment on Roxbury on the mainland. This would require the rebels to keep troops there in some strength, just in case it was the softening barrage before a secondary British attack.
Meanwhile, farther north, two frigates and a couple of gunboats were raking the Charlestown causeway to keep rebel reinforcements from crossing from the mainland.
The guns on Copp’s Hill and the cannon on the Somerset, more than thirty fired per salvo, were still pounding heavy cannonballs at the rebel redoubt.
To the southeast of Charlestown, two more frigates—Lively and Falcon—and Spitfire, a sloop, were hurling shot in salvo after salvo onto the lower slopes of Breed’s Hill and the ground behind the landing beaches to curb any challenge to the approaching boats.
The leading barges in the flotilla were level with Moulton Point. A blue signal flag fluttered from a leading boat. The helmsmen pushed over the tillers, and the twenty-eight craft deployed in two long lines abreast moving steadily toward the beach.
The guns on the three covering ships flashed as their broadsides crashed cannonballs and the smaller antipersonnel grapeshot onto the ground ahead of the barges. Great clouds of smoke mushroomed over the water.
The boats grated on the beach, and the soldiers leaped over the sides, splashed ashore, and ran up the 100-yard slope of Moulton’s Hill, and formed in ranks. The sailors pushed the boats off the beach, and the flotilla, which could carry only 1,100 men, returned to Boston for the remainder of the attack force, the artillery and the commanding officers.
The rebels did not fire a single gun in opposition to the landing. They waited on Breed’s Hill.
Howe landed with his second-in-command, short, stocky Brigadier General Robert Pigot, and the bellicose Admiral Graves. From Moulton’s Hill he studied the country through which he would have to mount his attack.
His officers had already set up strong outposts to bear the first impact if the rebels attacked before they were ready to mount their assault. Each consisted of several companies—one, to Howe’s left, not far from Charlestown, the other away over to his right not far from the banks of the Mystic River, which flowed down the north side of the peninsula.
As the general considered his plans, the guns that had come over from Boston with him were being moved forward into the area between the two outposts. They were heavy. Each needed upwards of fifteen men, heaving on ropes and handholds on the carriages, to get them into position. The cannon—12-pounders and 6-pounders—were for long shooting; the fat, short-barreled howitzers, though less accurate, were for high-angle lobbing.
Each cannon had a firing crew of five, trained to work in careful and deliberate drill that would never vary even under the most urgent battle conditions. The gunners lived in constant danger from the material they were handling. Cannon often blew up—just a few smoldering sparks in the barrel unextinguished in the sponging that followed firing were enough to set off the next charge as it was rammed home.
Even the ammunition wagons often exploded, as friction, set up by movement, set off loose powder. That day there were no ammunition wagons, for there were no horses. The thick cartridges, powder packed in paper, and the shot that was not carried in the side boxes on the gun carriages were being manhandled in boxes and set up in dumps well to the rear of the guns. The recoil was a constant working problem of the gunners; every time the cannon fired they leaped back and had to be hauled forward again with ropes by the six-man nonfiring team. Even so, it was not uncommon for a battery of guns to end a session of heavy firing at least 100 yards behind their starting position.
The guns were set up in line between the two outposts under Moulton’s Hill. In the rear at the side stood the senior artillery officer with the linstock—a small pike, held point upward. Entwined around the crossbar was the smoldering ropelike slow match from which the lead gunners lit their matches. Holding their bodies well clear of the gun carriages so that they would not be knocked over by the recoil, they would reach forward to the touchholes.
Together, Howe and Pigot studied the country before them. The Charlestown peninsula was a triangle. In the corners were three hills, each smaller than the last so that the contour resembled a curving switchback. The biggest, to the northwest, was Bunkei Hill, which looped south to Breed’s Hill, whose lower eastern slope! curved up to Moulton’s Hill, where the British force was now waiting and which was the smallest of the three. The countryside was farmland—featured by apple trees and meadows divided by wooder fences. A small lane, lined by rough stone walls, encircled the lowei slopes of Breed’s and Bunker hills curving through the valley to the north.
From where Howe was standing, he could see Breed’s Hill to his left with Charlestown at its foot. Farther to the right, he looked directly at the more distant heights of Bunker Hill.
The rebel positions were very different from what he had expected. Apart from those rebels who were concealed in the redoubt, the Americans were in force on the hillsides—especially Bunker Hill, which was probably designed as a fallback position if they were forced off Breed’s.
The redoubt, too, was more substantial than he had anticipat-ed-as Clinton had warned. It was now completely enclosed with thick 6-foot-high walls on all sides. Basically a rough square, 50 yards across, the front wall was angled so that it jutted into a point. To the west, a breastwork-a bare wall constructed like those of the redoubt itself—reached down the hill to check an attack on the flanks.
The rebels were clearly aware of the potential danger to their flanks. The breastwork stretched only down part of the hill; the British could still march along the lower country to the north near the Mystic River. To cover this ground, the rebels had set up a lighter fortified position behind an old rail fence. This, though parallel with it, was about 200 yards behind the breastwork, but it reached all the way down to the banks of the river.
As Howe was studying the rail fence through his eyeglass, he saw several hundred rebels moving down from Bunker Hill to take up positions behind it.
His force was not adequate, he decided, and he sent back to Boston for reinforcements. To cut delay to the minimum, they were ordered to land near Charlestown—instead of traveling all the way to Moulton Point—and join up with his left wing that would attack up the hill from his western outpost near Charlestown.
Meanwhile, this post was under fire from snipers on the rooftops of the town. Admiral Graves, always eager to set fire to anything, offered to burn it; that morning he had given instructions for cannonballs to be heated in the forge on the Somerset.
Orders were sent back by boat both to the Somerset and to Burgoyne and Clinton on Copp’s Hill. By the time the flotilla was streaming across the channel with Howe’s reserves, red-hot shot was dropping on Charlestown’s fragile houses. The Boston battery was shooting carcasses—hollow iron shells, filled with burning materials that licked flames through holes in the casing.
Within minutes, fire was sweeping through the little town. “The church steeples, being timber, were great pyramids of fire above the rest . . . ,” the watching Burgoyne reported later, “a crash of churches, ships upon the stocks and whole streets falling together, filled the ear. . . . All sending up columns of smoke and flame. . . .”
At two o’clock, when he had seen his reinforcements approaching, Howe ordered the advance.
Pigot was in command of the left wing, with orders to march straight up Breed’s Hill toward the rough rebel fort at its peak. The reserves that would soon be landing near the burning town would join him on the slopes. This would give him 1,000 men for an attack that, because it was really a feint, would be slow and showy.
Howe, who also had 1,000 men, but with more crack troops than Pigot, would advance along the edge of the peninsula near the Mystic River, leaving the redoubt and its defense breastwork well over to his left, and storm the rail fence. Then he would wheel sharply and attack hard up the hill.
But Howe was planning a double flank assault. The banks of the Mystic River—to which the rail fence reached—were eight feet high; even though the tide was now in full flood, there was just room on the beach below for a column of men to make a fast advance out of sight of the defenders above and to leap on them from the rear at the same time that Howe’s main force attacked from the front.
The field guns opened up to support the advances of the two forces moving slowly in their different directions through knee-high summer grass.
Howe’s regiments were already formed abreast in the three ranks that were traditional for the British army: In the front line were the light infantry, followed by the tall, broad-shouldered grenadiers, while in the third rank were the ordinary foot soldiers from line infantry regiments of lesser renown. Behind them they heard the booming explosions as their field cannon and howitzers fired in unison. The balls whistled over their heads toward the rebel positions.
Then they were halted while the guns were hauled closer to the enemy by the sweating pioneer teams.
Again, they were ordered to advance. The long ranks of red-coated soldiers curved and broke as they clambered over the timber posts and rails between the meadows. Their faces glistened with the heat. With their blankets and packs and heavy muskets, they were each carrying 125 pounds into battle. Despite the full glare of the afternoon sun, they were wearing the same thick coats they wore in the winter.
On the lower slopes of Breed’s Hill, Pigot’s columns, working their way, like Howe’s men, through tall grass and fences, were moving toward the rebel redoubt. The soldiers could see the enemy above the high walls—heads in the familiar deep-crowned country hats with floppy brims. Shot from the guns behind them were striking the redoubt; but it was strongly constructed, and the artillery was not making much impact on the thick walls.
Pigot ordered his drummer18 to beat to deploy, and the columns swung slowly around to form long, wavy ranks, two deep, moving up the hill closing on the little fort of earth and stone.
Howe’s division advanced into a hollow from which they were hidden temporarily from the rebels waiting at the rail fence. The general gave an order. The front rank, the light infantry, suddenly filed off to the right toward the river, clambered down the bank and formed in ranks of four on the narrow strip of beach beside the swirling water. Then they moved forward fast.19
On the ground above them, the rest of Howe’s divisions—now only two ranks with the grenadiers, in their tall black fur caps, in the front line—continued with their slow unhurried advance toward the rail fence. Ahead of them lay a brick kiln and, near it, two small ponds. Again the long ranks broke as they moved around the obstruction and stopped on the other side to re-form. They were not too far from the rebels now. Meadows stretched ahead of them—wide grassy fields broken by apple trees and more wooden fences. To their left was the breastwork jutting down the hill toward them. That, too, was lined with the heads of watching men. Circling above them, frightened by the noise of the cannon, was a thick flock of swallows.
The British guns behind them had stopped firing, and Howe sent back an aide to find out why. The young officer was horrified by what he saw. For the cannon were bogged down in ground that was deceptive.20 The carriages had sunk to the axles. The pioneer teams were heaving on the ropes; other men were dragging on the wheel spokes, pushing from behind, hauling on the carriage handholds. Sweating, red-faced soldiers were slipping in the wet ground as they flung their weight forward in response to the sergeants’ urging.
Given time, the artillerymen would be able to get the guns onto firmer ground. There was a road nearby—the same country lane Howe would have noted in his anxious survey from Moulton’s Hill-that led to the west of Bunker Hill between the rebel breastwork on the left and the fortified rail fence on the right.
If necessary, the gunners could take the guns off the carriages and transport them separately, then reassemble them on the roadway.
But Howe, with his light infantry already advancing along the beach, with Pigot’s 1,000 men strung out, moving upward on the hillside, did not have the time to wait. He had no alternative but to press on with the attack without the support of his guns.
The column of light infantry—some 300 men—was progressing fast along the shore. The rebels had realized that the beach was a vulnerable point, and they had constructed a rough defense position—a pile of stones taken from nearby walls. Behind this, the British could see the men crouched waiting.
To the advancing soldiers, the obstacle did not seem very great; their orders were not to fire their muskets but to attack fast with the bayonet—15 inches of three-sided steel that they were well drilled to use.
On they swung toward the pile of stones—tight in their ranks, four men to a row. High on their left was the riverbank; close on their right was the water.
In retrospect, it is hard to see how the attack could ever have been successful. It depended solely on enough soldiers reaching the defense work of stone to attack with the bayonet, which the rebels did not possess. It depended on bad shooting. It depended, most of all, on every rebel’s firing his gun in the first volley, enabling the British to be over the parapet of stones in the time taken to reload.
All the Americans did not fire in the first volley; they shot in groups in rotation.
The first volley, fired when the troops were barely 100 yards from the pile of stones, was lethal enough. Nearly all the men in the leading ranks staggered as the metal struck them, then collapsed on the beach. The next volley did just as much damage as the following soldiers charged, leaping over the bodies of their comrades to become sprawled bodies themselves.
The column stopped, bunched as the men in the rear ranks still advanced, then, under the urging of the officers, advanced again. Once more, the rebel muskets fired, and again men fell in heaps on the narrow strip of shore.
It was impossible to go on. The column checked. The officers urged their men to attack, but the objective was impossible. The soldiers turned and ran, leaving ninety-six men, a third of the column, in the writhing human heaps on the narrow strip of beach beside the waters of the river.
Reluctantly, Howe accepted the fact that the beach position was too strongly held. He ordered a frontal assault on the rebel position behind the fortified rail fence—a much more formidable operation now that there would be no surprise attack from the rear but still practical. The line was 250 yards long; there would be no bunching as there had been on the beach.
The British advanced. Cannon shot were falling from the rebel artillery positioned on Bunker Hill but did little damage. There was some fire from the men behind the enemy position, but it was sparse. Almost certainly, those men shooting were doing so prematurely.
As usual, Howe had given orders that the grenadiers in their long ranks were not to fire. They were to get to the enemy as fast as possible and attack with the bayonet.
He ordered the charge, but there was a fence in the way—a fence he later blamed as the cause of his whole disaster. As the grenadiers clambered over it, checked sitting targets, the rebels opened up. Again, the shooting was close-range and lethally accurate. Right along the extended line, the tall men toppled into the thick grass. Instinctively, the men who remained on their feet stopped and, instead of rushing the fence as they had been ordered, “began firing,” as Howe wrote later, “and by crowding fell into disorder and in this state the second line mixed with them.”
Horrified by the sight of his broken ranks so soon after the repulse of his light infantry, “there was a moment,” as Howe conceded later, “that I have never felt before.”
The fire from behind the barricade at the fence was incessant—a continuous crackling of gunshot, carving gaps in the confused mass of men in front of the post and rails they had just clambered over. Soldiers on the ground were screaming from their wounds, their cries piercing the staccato rattle of the muskets.
The grenadiers broke. They turned their backs, vaulted the fence that had proved such an obstacle and ran out of range.
Nearly all the staff officers with Howe were killed or wounded. At one moment, too, a British Major John Small stood alone, deserted by the retreating grenadiers.21 He saw three men raise their muskets and aim at him—when General Putnam rode up and knocked the guns up with his sword. Putnam was one of America’s most famous veteran soldiers; in the French and Indian War he had fought beside many of the men he was now fighting, among them Major Small. The rebel general saved his life.
At last, Howe’s officers checked their fleeing men and, pricking the frightened soldiers with their swords, forced them to re-form in their ranks. Again they advanced, “stepping over the bodies of their comrades,” as one watching American described it later, “as if they were logs.”
And again a storm of carefully aimed lead flayed the lines of charging men and broke them with terrible casualties. The assault became impractical. For the second time, the troops turned and fled out of range.
Meanwhile, high up on the hill, Pigot’s division was attacking the redoubt and the breastwork wall, even though the planned drive from the west had not yet materialized.
The pattern of the rebel defense was similar to what Howe’s men had already experienced down below, on the banks of the Mystic. As the long lines of soldiers moved up the hill, closing on the redoubt, there was little firing from the fort, just a few badly aimed impatient long shots. But the closer they moved, the better they could see the rebels—faces under the country hats bent to the stocks of their weapons—lined along the muddy walls, waiting for them to come close.
The troops were only 50 yards from the fort when the first blast of fire came—and continued with the same catastrophic effect that had reduced Howe’s force below.
Each of the Americans’ best shots, as the British learned later, was using several guns, served by loaders. There was no respite for reloading that normally followed the first volley—the pause when the charge was always ordered. Many of the guns were rifles,22 more accurate than smoothbore muskets but slower to load.
Pigot’s left wing was under the heaviest fire of all in that long devastated line.
In addition to the deadly close-range shooting from the east side of the redoubt, the troops were under heavy fire from rebels in a group of farm buildings on the hillside. Many officers were killed. One of them, Major John Pitcairn, who had led the advance guard at Lexington, fell dead into the arms of his son.
Pigot, in the center of his extended line, realized that he could not sustain his attack and ordered the retreat. When the soldiers heard the drumming, they fell back so fast that it was nearly a rout.
From the redoubt they heard the jubilant cheering of the rebels.
On every front, Howe’s attack had failed. His troops had been mown down by precision shooting at close range. Throughout the whole length of the rebel lines, British dead lay in heaps. The wounded, in their hundreds, were trailing slowly toward the beaches. According to some reports, a group of officers begged Howe to abandon the battle, but this would have been inconceivable to the general.
Defeated military leaders were always roughly handled in London. In this case, when Howe’s force was heavy with Britain’s top troops against an enemy of untrained farmers, there could be no defense. It would have been the end of his career.
Howe was not finished yet. He replanned his attack with his bruised and battered regiments. He had already sent back to Boston for yet more reinforcements and asked the admiral for some naval gunpower in the Mystic behind the rebel lines. He never got his cannon in the river because the tide was flowing in the wrong direction, but his own field guns had now been extricated from the marsh and were waiting on the road with their firing crews, together with their teams of pioneers.
This time Howe changed the strategy. As before there would be an attack on the rail fence, to be mounted by the light infantry, but it would be a feint designed to keep the rebel force there occupied. The main assault would be a combined operation on the main rebel position on the top of the hill by the rest of the British regiments in the divisions of both Howe and Pigot.
He had also learned by savage experience that the battle would be tough enough without any unnecessary hindrances. The troops were ordered to take off their heavy packs. Some of them, according to American sources, even removed their scarlet coats.
Pigot, still commanding the left, held back his main force and sent forward his marines and one infantry regiment to storm the farm buildings on the hillside from which the rebel snipers had poured such accurate fire on his left in the previous attack. He waited until he saw his troops swarm through the buildings; then, once more, he ordered his division to advance in the long, crooked scarlet lines up the hill toward the redoubt. This time Pigot was not concerned with the breastwork wall, for it was at this point that Howe was going to concentrate the whole of his attack. Pigot’s men had to rush the walls of the fort itself.
The train of cannon began to move up the country lane that reached around the base of the hill between the breastwork on its left and, 200 yards farther on, the rail fence position on its right. As the huge teams of hot and grimy men hauled on the ropes, the iron-rimmed wheels stirred up a cloud of dust. Behind them, more men lugged the boxes of reserve ammunition.
Meanwhile, Howe’s grenadiers moved slowly through the long grass, this time in columns toward the breastwork. The cannon continued along the road until they were past the breastwork; then they were swung around and set up so that they could fire from the rear on the rebels behind the wall waiting for the assault of the grenadiers.
The cannon opened up. Howe, with his men still formed in columns, watched the flash from his guns as they dropped shot along the wall. Then, as the smoke from the salvo drifted toward him, he ordered the attack. Yelling, the grenadiers charged in column. The leading men clawed their way up the wall to meet a hail of bullets from the side crossfire from the redoubt and from three small isolated enemy positions on the right. The defense was too deadly. The men dropped back off the breastwork.
Howe rallied them as his repeated explosions of smoking guns echoed through the hills and metal rained on the rebels behind the wall. Once more the grenadiers charged and swarmed the breastwork. This time the rebels did not remain to meet them. Short of ammunition, they ran for the shelter of the fort.
The British cannon lengthened their range, aiming now at the six-foot walls of the redoubt itself to force the men defending to take cover. The grenadiers advanced, then checked before the barrage of cannon shot falling ahead of them.
The rebels crouched behind the wall of the redoubt for shelter were firing in the intervals as the field pieces loaded. So close at last to the enemy, the waiting soldiers “grew impatient”—so Lord Francis Rawdon reported—and shouted, “Push on! push on!”
The cannon held their fire as the grenadiers charged the redoubt, and the Americans could then raise their heads above the parapet to pour “in so heavy a fire upon us that the oldest officers say they never saw a sharper action. They kept up this fire until we were within ten yards of them . . . they even knocked down my captain close beside me, after we got into the ditch of the entrenchment.”
The ditch was immediately under the redoubt—designed to make the walls higher to climb. Temporarily, it provided good cover because it was hard for the rebels to aim without leaning right over the parapet and making themselves easy targets.
Meanwhile, as Howe’s grenadiers, some of them waiting in the ditch, were preparing for a final assault on the northern side of the redoubt, Pigot’s men were closing in on the southeast.
Farther down the hill, Clinton was at the head of an approaching column of British troops. From his position with Burgoyne on Copp’s Hill, he had seen the British left wing crumple in the earlier assault; he had watched the two reserve battalions that Howe had summoned as they landed from the boats. The troops had seemed uncertain where to join the battle.
At last, he could bear it no longer. Although he had no orders, he decided that Howe could clearly use another general. He had hurried down the hill, crossed the channel in a boat and landed under sniping from rebel marksmen still concealed in smoldering Charlestown. There he had taken command of the reserves “and such wounded men as could follow, which to their honor were many, and advanced in column with as much parade as possible to impress the enemy.”
It also impressed the British. Again the left wing was under terrible pressure. The marines were edging forward, but they were held back by a stream of heavy fire from the eastern wall of the redoubt. “We did not retreat an inch,” insisted Marine Adjutant Waller, though he conceded that “we were now in confusion, after being broke several times in getting over the rails. . . . .”
Desperately, Waller did all he could to form his troops in ranks for a charge, but all the time men were dropping as the rebel muskets cracked out. “Had we stopped there much longer,” reported Waller after the battle, “the enemy would have picked us all off.”
Waller knew that they would either have to make a fast run for the walls or have to drop back. Urgently, he asked the commander of some of the new infantry Clinton had brought up to form with his marines for a charge. “I ran from left to right while this was doing and, when we had got in tolerable order, we rushed, leaped the ditch and climbed the parapet.”
When the British appeared on the wall, the rebels retreated to the far side of the redoubt so that they were far enough back to shoot—and out of immediate reach of the bayonets.
On the north side, a grenadier company also stormed the walls. The company’s captain had already died. His lieutenant leaped onto the parapet. “The day is ours,” he yelled and dropped dead off the wall. The sergeant scrambled into his place. “Conquer or die,” he bawled, and jumped into the redoubt with his men streaming over after him.
On the east wall, Pigot, short and tubby as he was, led the charge himself, grabbing a branch of an apple tree and swinging himself onto the wall.
The British were now swarming over the parapet in several places. At last, after all the slaughter in their own ranks, they were able to use the bayonets which their commanders always favored. Waller, who had led the charge of the British left, was appalled. “Nothing could be more shocking than the carnage . . .” he wrote. “We tumbled over the dead to get at the living who were crowding out of the redoubt. . . .”
The soldiers, thrusting and twisting their bayonets, went wild in an orgy of killing of an enemy that, until now, had always been hidden. “All was confusion,” wrote Clinton. “Officers told me that they could not command their men and I never saw so great a want of order.”
Major Small, whose life had been saved by Putnam, jumped from the wall to the floor of the redoubt and saw Dr. Joseph Warren, president of the Provincial Congress, among the Americans breaking their way out of the northern side of the fort. “For God’s sake stop,” Small yelled to him, “and save your life.
“Warren looked and seemed to recognise me, but kept on,” Small recounted.
Warren was shot in the head during the retreat a few minutes later. Marine Lieutenant John Clarke saw him lying in a trench, a soldier standing over him, bayonet poised. Warren pleaded for his life, “for he was much wounded and could not live a great while longer; however the soldier swore that . . . he had done more mischief than anyone else and immediately ran him through the body.” The soldier stripped Warren of his light-colored coat, white satin waistcoat and white breeches with silver loops and left him sprawling half-naked, dead on the ground.
Howe himself was wounded in the foot but remained in command, leaning against a support. He accepted Clinton’s offer to take charge of the soldiers who were pursuing the rebels down the hill toward the causeway. The Americans were retreating slowly, fighting all the way.
Clinton formed up the British in ranks and marched down the road that stretched down the hill in the middle of the peninsula toward the Charlestown Neck. From there, using the cover of the stone walls, they could fire on the rebels on either side.
The Americans set up a cannon at the causeway to cover their retreat. By six o’clock that evening the last of the rebels who could walk had crossed to the mainland. The British were in control of the peninsula.
It had been one of the most costly victories in British history. Out of an estimated assault force of 2,200, there were 1,054 casualties, nearly half the men engaged.
As the dusk fell, the British began to clear the battlefield. Dead private soldiers were buried where they lay. Officers were carried in their sashes to the boats for transport to Boston for “decent burial” in churchyards.
MHE..Many of the wounded British privates, like all the rebels that lay still alive on the battlefield, had to remain where they were all night until the next morning, when those who had survived were finally shipped to the Boston hospital, now so overcrowded that even its yard was full of moaning soldiers.
Many would die or lose their maimed limbs in amputation. The rebel muskets, wrote one British hospital doctor later, “were charged with old nails and angular pieces of iron; and for most of our men being wounded in the legs, we are inclined to believe it was their design, not wishing to kill the men, but leave them as burdens on us to exhaust our provisions and . . . intimidate the soldiery.”
That night, while the wounded still lay on the hillside, below the redoubt—now occupied by 100 British soldiers—the wounded Howe lay propped against some straw on the north side of the fort where he could watch the rebels build a fortification on a hill on the mainland. His attendants had orders to wake him if he fell asleep.
Early the following morning he wrote his daily orders as if nothing exceptional had happened though he noted “the bravery and intrepidity he [the general] with the greatest satisfaction observed they [the troops] displayed yesterday.”
As always after a battle, the women came into their own. The following day Howe ordered each corps to send two women to attend the hospital where army surgeons worked without sleep for forty-eight hours to help with the casualties. To comfort the troops on Bunker Hill, four women were to cross the. water to Charlestown for each company camped there. This order was clearly exceeded, for two days later Howe repeated his limit of four women per company and insisted “that these be the best behaved and bring no children with them.”
It was all very unemotional and practical. In his formal report to Gage, Howe was brief and to the point—a masterpiece of understatement that omitted any direct reference to the repeated repulses his men had suffered.
Gage, too, was coolly factual in his official letter to Lord Dartmouth, commenting that the “orders were executed with perseverance under a heavy fire with vast numbers of rebels. . . .”
He knew this would be published in the London Gazette, so he was cautious. But, in a private letter to Dartmouth, he elaborated about “the success” and wished “most sincerely that it had not cost us so dear. . . .
“The trials we have had show that the rebels are not the despicable rabble too many supposed them to be. . . .”
By the time Gage’s letters arrived London had long been shocked into action by the news of Lexington and Concord. Britain was already preparing for a full-scale war.