Читать книгу The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson - Страница 15

BOSTON AND CHARLESTOWN, MAY–JUNE 1775

An army of sorts soon bivouacked along a ten-mile crescent from Roxbury to Chelsea, determined to serve the god of battle by driving the British into the sea. In late April, the provincial congress called for thirty thousand American troops to turn out, and legions left farm, shop, and hearth, including one patriot and his three sons who hurried from their sawmill without even bothering to shut the gate. Two thousand were said to march from New Hampshire. Forty-six of Connecticut’s seventy-two towns sent men, and classes at Yale College were canceled for lack of students. “The ardor of our people is such that they can’t be kept back,” a committee in New Haven informed John Hancock. A woman in Philadelphia wrote, “My only brother I have sent to the camp.… Had I twenty sons and brothers, they should go.”

The Essex Gazette would name this host the Grand American Army, though William Tudor, a protégé of John Adams’s who soon would serve as judge advocate, called it “little better than an armed mob.” Houses abandoned by loyalist families in Cambridge were confiscated for barracks and officers’ billets. Eleven hundred tents accumulated by the Committee of Supply sprouted along the Charles, and a request went out to sailmakers and ship masters for more. “We have stripped the seaports of canvas to make tents,” a member of the provincial congress reported. Any man who enlisted fifty-nine others into a company qualified for a captaincy; any captain who organized ten companies might be designated a regimental colonel.

Drums beat reveille daily at four a.m., and after roll call the men marched to morning prayers. “The camp abounds with clergymen,” one soldier wrote, and more than a dozen local divines volunteered their services for regiments without chaplains. Officers were empowered to suppress “tumults” in the ranks, to confine men to their tents after evening tattoo, and to shutter grogshops selling liquor to the troops. The smells of encampment grew ripe—wood smoke, roasting meat, imperfectly dug latrines. Soldiers cast new bullets with molding tools, fashioning cartridges from paper scraps and thimbles of powder. A homesick soldier hanged himself in a barn. “I went down & saw him,” a private noted in his journal, then added, “I went home & took a nap.” More rumors flew, including a pastor’s warning in early May to beware “lest General Gage should spread the smallpox in your army.”

No sooner did the Grand American Army muster than it began to melt away. Farmers left to tend their spring fields, shopkeepers to tend their counters. Most Connecticut troops soon wandered home, discouraged by the shortage of provisions around Boston. The force would dwindle to sixteen thousand or so within a month after the shots at Lexington, although no one was sure of the number. “As to the army, it is in such a shifting, fluctuating state,” a Committee of Safety member wrote. “They are continually going and coming.” To deceive the British in mid-May, a brigade of seven hundred men in Roxbury marched round and round a hill to feign preponderance; a mile-long column of more than two thousand marched from Cambridge to the Charlestown fish market, bared their fangs across the Charles, then marched back.

Shortages extended beyond canvas and rations. “We are in want of almost everything, but of nothing so much as arms and ammunition,” Joseph Warren wrote on May 15 to Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress had just convened. Massachusetts counted thirty-eight cannons, mostly inferior iron guns. Rhode Island sent a few brass fieldpieces to the siege line, but they hardly sufficed to confront the British Empire. In mid-month, welcome news arrived from Lake Champlain in New York, more than two hundred miles northwest: at three-thirty a.m. on May 10, eighty-five whooping New England roughnecks, later described as “tatterdemalions in linsey-woolsey who call themselves Green Mountain Boys,” had swarmed from a scow-rigged bateau to overrun the British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga.

Almost fifty sleepy redcoats had surrendered without a fight, as had a smaller detachment at nearby Crown Point. The captured booty included some two hundred iron cannons, ten tons of musket balls, thirty thousand flints, and forty-nine gallons of rum, much of it consumed by those tatterdemalions to celebrate their victory. Two men led the raid in an unsteady collaboration: a strapping, profane, sometime farmer, lead miner, and tosspot philosopher named Ethan Allen and a short, gifted Connecticut apothecary, merchant prince, and hothead named Benedict Arnold, who had been given a colonel’s commission by Joseph Warren and whose long nose and dark hair caused him to resemble a raven in human form. How the captured munitions would be transported from the remote fortress remained to be seen, but no one who knew Allen and Arnold, or knew of them, doubted that both would be heard from again. For now, the “acts of burglarious enterprise,” in one British writer’s description, gave the Americans control not only of Ticonderoga—the most strategic inland position on the continent—but also of the long blue teardrop of Lake Champlain, the traditional invasion route into, or out of, Canada.

Life in besieged Boston grew grimmer by the day. Soon after the fighting began, General Gage agreed to issue exit permits to those who wanted to leave town if all citizens surrendered their weapons at Faneuil Hall. By late April, some 1,778 firelocks had been handed over, plus 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 ancient blunderbusses. Gage insisted that swords also be added to the pile. “Nearly half the inhabitants have left the town already,” the merchant John Andrews wrote a friend on May 6. “You see parents that are lucky enough to procure papers, with bundles in one hand and a string of children in the other, wandering out of town … not knowing where they’ll go.” Provisions grew short, prices soared, fresh food vanished. “Pork and beans one day,” Andrews wrote, “and beans and pork another.”

Loyalists from the countryside slipped into Boston for Crown protection, then complained bitterly to Gage that allowing all rebel sympathizers to leave would invite bombardment of the town; hostages must be kept to discourage attack. Gage saw the point, and the exodus largely stopped except for those able to sneak out by boat. “It is inconceivable the distress and ruin this unnatural dispute has caused to this town and its inhabitants,” the surveyor Henry Pelham wrote on May 16. “Almost every shop and store is shut. No business of any kind is going on.” A British lieutenant observed after taking a stroll, “I can’t help looking on it as a ruined town. I think I see the grass growing in every street.” More grass was needed: provender for British horses by late May was short by three thousand tons. Warming weather and a diet of salt meat brought widespread illness. Reverend Henry Caner, a loyalist, would write to London, “It is not uncommon to bury 20 to 30 a week among the troops and inhabitants.… If our lives must pay for our loyalty, God’s will be done.” Another loyalist clergyman, Reverend John Wiswall, who took refuge with his family in Boston from Cape Cod, noted in his journal, “My daughter died the 23rd and my wife the 26th. Buried in family tomb the 28th.”

From his Province House headquarters, Gage awaited reinforcements and braced against a rebel assault. Regiments built several small batteries on the Common and a larger redoubt on Beacon Hill. Gunners at Boston Neck were ordered to keep lighted matches by their cannons at all times. Regulars patrolled the wharves every half hour. Loyalist volunteers with white cockades in their hats kept vigil in the streets at night. “We are threatened with great multitudes,” Gage wrote Lord Dartmouth in mid-May. “The people called friends of government are few.” News from the other provinces was bleak. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire were “in open rebellion,” he told London. “They are arming at New York and, as we are told, in Philadelphia and all the southern provinces.” The royal mail was no longer secure; a postal rider with official correspondence from New York had been detained, his locked bag jimmied open with hammer and pliers.

Guard boat crews patrolled the harbor with 6-pounders, alert for fire rafts and often ducking sniper rounds from the far shore. Ships from England no sooner dropped anchor than potshots rang out. “The country is all in arms, and we are absolutely invested with many thousand men, some of them so daring as to come very near our outposts,” Captain Glanville Evelyn wrote his father in Scotland. Morale sank in the regular ranks. A Royal Navy surgeon permitted to treat wounded British captives in Cambridge wrote in May that the rebel army “is truly nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness.” A new British drinking song warned:

Boston we shall in ashes lay,

It is a nest of knaves,

We’ll make them soon for mercy pray,

Or send them to their graves.

There would be ashes on May 17. That night, a sergeant in the 65th Regiment reportedly delivered musket cartridges by candlelight to the barracks on Treat’s Wharf; soon after his arrival, a small, accidental blaze grew into a conflagration that burned until three a.m. Gage had placed the town’s fire engines under military control, and inept redcoats, one merchant complained, operated the apparatus “with such stupidity that the flames raged with incredible fury & destroyed 30 stores.” The losses at Dock Square also included regimental uniforms, weapons, and donations collected for Boston’s poor.

Fresh meat for British larders and forage for British horses could be found within a mile or two of Province House, but trouble could be found there as well. In Boston Harbor, more than thirty islands—used for over a century as livestock pastures and hay fields—stippled the narrow, twisting approaches from open water. Shoals, mudflats, salt creeks, and sandbars changed shape with each new tide. Much of the harbor at low water was no deeper than three fathoms—eighteen feet—while the three largest Royal Navy ships on station drew twenty feet or more. American mariners skittered through this watery terrain in smacks, canoes, and whaleboats, trading shots at long range with British foraging parties. On May 21, Gage sent several sloops to Grape Island, but they scavenged only eight tons of hay before rebels burned eighty more.

On Saturday morning, May 27, six hundred Massachusetts and New Hampshire militiamen scuffed from the Chelsea meetinghouse down Beach Road to the shoreline. By eleven a.m., the ebbing tide had fallen enough to let them slosh knee-deep across narrow Belle Isle Creek to Hog Island, where, as ordered by the Committee of Safety, they rounded up 411 sheep, 27 cows, and 6 horses, shooting those that would not be herded. The British were to get none. Thirty men waded across Crooked Creek to adjacent Noddle’s Island, at the confluence of the Charles and Mystic Rivers. At seven hundred acres, Noddle’s was the largest of the harbor isles, once a refuge for Baptist apostates driven from Boston by Puritans, and long a favorite dueling ground for aggrieved parties of all denominations. Here the rebels set fire to a barn piled high with salt hay.

Aboard the fifty-gun Preston in the Boston anchorage, the sight of thick smoke to the east caught the squinting eye of Samuel Graves, commander of the North American station. Graves this very week had received news from London of his promotion to vice admiral of the white; he celebrated with a thirteen-gun salute from his squadron and colors appropriate to his new rank hoisted above Preston’s deck. A sixty-two-year-old sea dog who had never held high command before arriving in America a year earlier, Graves was a harbor admiral; recovering from a small stroke, he had shuttled between his flagship and a comfortable house on Pearl Street without once in nineteen months venturing out past the Boston lighthouse. His talents were modest—the new promotion notwithstanding—and his grievances many. With thirty vessels in his squadron, but only four substantial ships of force, he was to ensure that Britannia ruled the waves along an eighteen-hundred-mile littoral, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Florida. Despite a stupendous increase in smuggling by American insurgents, he admitted that during this past winter “no seizures of any consequence have been made.”

Graves badgered the Admiralty with legitimate complaints about “properly guarding this extensive coast with the few vessels I have”; about the poor condition of those vessels—Hope was “very leaky,” and so were Halifax, Somerset, and others; about the difficulty of getting guns, pilots, provisions, and proper sailors; and about idiotic orders from home, including a directive to search the ballast of every ship arriving in North America for smuggled musket flints, as if ample flint could not be found in American rock. He also complained about General Gage, whom he detested and who detested him in return. With four nephews at sea in the king’s service, Graves was a master of nepotism; Lord North’s undersecretary, William Eden, would describe him this year as “a corrupt admiral without any shadow of capacity.” He was suspected, among other indiscretions, of selling stringy mutton on the Boston black market. Captain Evelyn spoke for many in asserting that “every man both in the army and navy wishes him recalled.”

Graves loathed “rebellious fanatics,” and in that smoke billowing from Noddle’s Island he spied a chance to show General Gage how they should be fought. At three p.m., a detachment of 170 marines from Glasgow, Cerberus, and Somerset landed on the island’s western flank. At the same time, the Diana, a new 120-ton armed schooner just that morning back from chasing gunrunners in Maine under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Graves—from the quartet of nephews—worked her way into Chelsea Creek, which separated the mainland from Noddle’s and Hog Islands. More marines followed Diana in a dozen longboats to cut off the rebel retreat. The pop of militia muskets now sounded from behind stone walls around the Winnisimet ferry landing. Diana answered with grapeshot and bore down on rebel drovers herding livestock through the shallows and onto Beach Road. Fifteen militiamen squatted in a Noddle’s marsh as a rear guard, swapping volleys with the regulars. “The bullets flew very thick,” Corporal Amos Farnsworth of Groton reported. “The balls sung like bees round our heads.” From the Cerberus quarterdeck, marines manhandled a pair of 3-pounders ashore and from a sandy embankment shelled the ferry landing.

Spattered with fire from both flanks, Lieutenant Graves decided that Diana had gone far enough. But as he sought to come about, the wind died. Longboats nosed alongside with hawsers to tow her down Chelsea Creek. Bullets smacked the water. Oarsmen bent low at the gunwales as the schooner inched back toward the wider harbor.

At twilight three hundred militia reinforcements rushed into the skirmish line with their own pair of 3-pounders, the first use of American field artillery in the war. In command was a stubby, rough-hewn brawler with a shock of white hair. Brigadier General Israel Putnam—“Old Put” to his men—was described by the Middlesex Journal as “very strongly made, no fat, all bones and muscles; he has a lisp in his speech and is now upwards of sixty years of age.” A wool merchant and farmer from Connecticut, barely literate, Putnam “dared to lead where any dared to follow,” one admirer observed; another called him “totally unfit for everything but fighting.” Stories had been told of him for decades in New England, most involving peril and great courage: how he once tracked down a wolf preying on his sheep, crawled headfirst into its den with a birch-bark torch to shoot it, then dragged the carcass out by the ears; how in the French war when a fire ignited a barracks, he organized a bucket brigade to save three hundred barrels of gunpowder, tossing pails of water onto the burning rafters from a ladder while wearing soaked mittens cut from a blanket; how he had been captured, starved, and tortured by Iroquois in 1758, and only the timely intervention of a French officer kept him from burning at the stake; how, after being shipwrecked on the Cuban coast during the Anglo-American expedition against Havana in 1762, he saved all hands by building rafts from spars and planks; how he had fought rebellious Indians near Detroit in Pontiac’s War of 1764, and later explored the Mississippi River valley; how he had left his plow upon hearing news of Lexington to ride a hundred miles in twenty-four hours to Cambridge. Now, wearing his scars and scorches like valor ribbons, he was ready to destroy Diana.

She was poised for destruction. After finally coming abreast of Winnisimet ferry just after ten p.m., the schooner was caught in a falling tide, her hull scraping bottom. The rebel fusillade from shore intensified, the gunners firing blindly at shadows on a moonless night, but vicious enough to kill two sailors, wound others, and cause the longboats to cast off their tow ropes. Lieutenant Graves tried to rig a kedge anchor and windlass to haul Diana free, but she stuck fast sixty yards from the beach, then heeled over onto her beam ends. The armed sloop Britannia eased close to pluck the crew from the canted deck as rebel 3-pounders boomed and Putnam, said to be wading waist-deep across the mudflats, shouted insults and blandishments in the dark. Swarming militiamen stripped the schooner of cannons, a dozen swivel guns, rigging, and sails, then piled hay under her bow and set it ablaze. At three a.m. flames reached the magazine, and Diana exploded in a fine rain of splintered oak.

Admiral of the White Graves buried his dead and ordered Somerset at dawn to fire long-range on the jubilant crowd capering along the Chelsea shore. Gage was disgusted by the schooner’s loss. “The general,” an aide wrote, “by no means approved of the admiral’s scheme, supposed it to be a trap, which it proved to be.” American raiders would return to the islands over the next two weeks, rustling another two thousand head of livestock while burning corn cribs, barns, and—heaping insult on the injuries—a storehouse that Graves had rented for cordage, lumber, and barrel staves.

“Heaven apparently and most evidently fights for us,” one Jonathan exulted. Putnam and his men returned to Cambridge in high feather. Diana’s mast had been salvaged and soon stood as a seventy-six-foot flagpole on Prospect Hill. A captured British barge with the sail hoisted was placed in a wagon and paraded around the Roxbury meetinghouse in early June to cheers and cannon salutes. “I wish,” Putnam was quoted as saying, “we have something of this kind to do every day.”

Gage declared martial law on June 12 with a long, windy denunciation of “the infatuated multitudes.” He offered to pardon those who “lay down their arms and return to the duties of peaceable subjects,” exclusive of Samuel Adams and John Hancock, “whose offenses are of too flagitious a nature” to forgive. He ended the screed with “God save the King.”

The same day, Gage wrote to Lord Barrington, the secretary at war, that “things are now come to that crisis that we must avail ourselves of every resource, even to raise the Negroes in our cause.… Hanoverians, Hessians, perhaps Russians may be hired.” To Lord Dartmouth he warned that he was critically low on both cash—he could not pay his officers—and forage; ships had been sent to Nova Scotia and Quebec seeking hay and oats. Crushing the rebellion, he estimated, would require more frigates and at least 32,000 soldiers, including 10,000 in New York, 7,000 around Lake Champlain, and 15,000 in New England. Another officer writing from Boston on June 12 advised London—the king himself received a copy—that the rebel blockade “is judicious & strong.” As for British operations, “all warlike preparations are wanting. No survey of the adjacent country, no proper boats for landing troops, not a sufficient number of horses for the artillery nor for the regimental baggage.” The war chest had “about three or four thousand [pounds] only remaining.… The rebellious colonies will supply nothing.”

Gage’s adjutant complained that “every idle report is carried to headquarters and … magnified to such a degree that rebels are seen in the air carrying cannon and mortars on their shoulders.” Some regulars longed for a decisive battle; “taking the bull by the horns” became an oft-heard phrase in the regiments. “I wish the Americans may be brought to a sense of their duty,” an officer wrote in mid-June. “One good drubbing, which I long to give them … might have a good effect.” As Captain Evelyn told his cousin in London, “If there is an honor in hard knocks, we are likely to have some share.”

The imminent arrival of transports with light dragoons, more marines, and several foot regiments would bring the British garrison to over six thousand troops, not enough to subdue Massachusetts, much less the continent, but sufficient, as Gage told London, to “make an attempt upon some of the rebel posts, which becomes every day more necessary.” Two alluring patches of high ground remained unfortified, and Gage knew from an informant that American commanders coveted the same slopes: the elevation beyond Boston Neck known as the Dorchester Heights, and the dominant terrain above Charlestown called Bunker, or Bunker’s Hill. A battle plan was made to seize the former on Sunday, June 18, with a bombardment of Roxbury while the rebels were at church, followed by the construction of two artillery redoubts on the heights. If all went well, regulars could then capture the high ground on Charlestown peninsula and eventually attack the American encampment at Cambridge.

No sooner was the plan conceived than it leaked to the Committee of Safety; British officers seemed incapable of keeping their mouths shut in a town full of American spies and eavesdroppers. Intelligence even came from New Hampshire, where a traveler out of Boston told authorities there about rumors of an imminent British sally. Meeting in Hastings House, a gambrel-roofed mansion near the Cambridge Common, the committee on June 15 voted unanimously that “the hill called Bunker’s Hill in Charlestown be securely kept and defended.” Dorchester Heights would have to wait until more guns and powder could be stockpiled.

The American camps bustled. Arms and ammunition were inspected, with each marching soldier to carry thirty rounds. A note to the Committee of Supply advised that “the army is destitute of shirts & trousers, and if any [are] in store, pray they may be sent.” Liquor sales stopped, again. Teamsters carted the books and scientific instruments from Harvard’s library to Andover for safekeeping. Organ pipes were yanked from the Anglican church and melted down for musket bullets. An ordnance storehouse issued all forty-eight shovels in stock as well as ammunition to selected regiments—typically forty or fifty pounds of powder, a thousand balls, and a few hundred flints. Commissaries in Cambridge and Roxbury reported that provisions arriving through June 16 included 1,869 loaves of bread and 357 gallons of milk from Cambridge vendors, 60 pairs of shoes from Milton, 1,570 pounds of beef and 40 barrels of beer from Watertown, a ton of candles, 1,500 pounds of soap, several hundred barrels of beans, peas, flour, and salt fish by the quintal, rum by the hogshead, and a few hundred tents, many without poles. All Massachusetts men within twenty miles of the coast were urged to carry their firelocks “to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they meet for public worship.” A sergeant from Wethersfield wrote his wife, “We’ve been in a great deal of hubbub.”

Orders spilled from the headquarters of Major General Ward, who occupied a southeast room on the Hastings House ground floor. Portly and sallow, sporting a powdered wig, boots, and a long coat with silver buttons, Artemas Ward, now forty-seven, had been chosen in February to command the Massachusetts militia on the strength of his long tenure in colonial politics. As a Harvard student, he once helped lead a campaign against “swearing and cursing” at the college; as a justice of the peace in Shrewsbury, he’d levied fines against the profane and could be found in the street reprimanding those who dishonored the Sabbath with unnecessary travel. Massachusetts, he believed, was home to the Chosen People. Ward had never fully recovered his health after the rigors of the French war, from which he’d emerged as a militia lieutenant colonel despite seeing little action. “Attacks of the stone”—kidney stones—still tormented him. Pious, honest, and devoted to the patriot cause, he was also taciturn, torpid, and stubborn. The gambit to hold Bunker Hill in Charlestown that he and the Committee of Safety had concocted was an impulse, not a plan. The rebel force lacked not only sufficient ammunition and field artillery but also combat reserves, a coherent chain of command, and even water. Ward had recently requested from the provincial congress almost sixty guns, fifteen hundred muskets, twenty tons of powder, and a similar quantity of lead; few of those munitions had been forthcoming.

Shortly after six p.m. on Friday, June 16, three Massachusetts regiments drifted through the arching elms and onto the Cambridge Common. They wore the usual homespun linen shirts and breeches tinted with walnut or sumac dye. Most carried a blanket or bedroll, often with a tumpline strap across the forehead to support the weight on their backs. A clergyman’s benediction droned over their bowed heads, and with a final amen they replaced their low-crowned hats and turned east down the Charlestown road.

Twilight faded and was gone, and the last birdsong faded with it. The first stars threw down their silver spears. Little rain had fallen in the past month, and dust boiled beneath each step. Candlelight gleamed from the rear of two bull’s-eye lanterns carried by sergeants at the head of the column. Officers commanded silence, and only the rattle of carts stacked with entrenching tools broke the quiet. Through parched orchards and across Willis Creek they marched, and past the hulking shadows of Prospect and Winter Hills. As they turned right toward Charlestown, a couple hundred Connecticut troops joined the column, bringing their strength to a thousand men.

General Ward had remained in his Hastings House headquarters, and the column was led by a sinewy, azure-eyed colonel wearing a blue coat with a single row of buttons and a tricorne hat. He carried a linen banyan. William Prescott of Pepperell, forty-nine and bookish, had fought twice in Canada during wars against the French, earning a reputation for cool self-possession under fire. In this war he reportedly had vowed never to be taken alive. “He was a bold man,” one soldier later wrote of him, “and gave his orders like a bold man.”

Bold orders this evening would prove to be ill-considered. As the procession crossed Charlestown Neck—barely ten yards wide at high tide—Prescott briefly conferred with the irrepressible Israel Putnam and Colonel Richard Gridley, an artilleryman and engineer who had also fought twice in Canada with distinction. From just below the isthmus, the three officers contemplated the dark contours of Charlestown peninsula, an irregular triangle a mile long and less than half that in width, bracketed by the Mystic and Charles Rivers. Even at night the dominant terrain was obvious: Bunker Hill rose gradually from the Neck for three hundred yards to a rounded crown 110 feet high, commanding not only the single land route off the peninsula, but the approach roads from Cambridge and Medford, as well as the adjacent waters. From the crest a low ridge swept southeast another six hundred yards to the patchwork of pastures, seventy-five feet high and sutured with rail fences, that would be called Breed’s Hill. Some fields had been scythed, the grass laid in windrows and cocks; in others it still stood waist-high. Brick kilns and clay pits pocked the steep eastern slope of the Breed’s pastures. Gardens and small orchards lay scattered to the west, backing the four hundred houses, shops, and buildings in Charlestown. Most of the three thousand residents had fled inland. The rising moon, three days past full, laved the town in amber light. Beyond the ferry landing and a spiny-masted warship in the Charles lay slumbering Boston.

For reasons never explained and certainly never understood, when the conference ended Prescott ordered the column to continue southeast. Colonel Gridley quickly staked out a redoubt—an imperfect square with sides about 130 feet long—not on nearly impregnable Bunker Hill, as the Committee of Safety had specified, but on the southwest slope of Breed’s pastureland. Accustomed to pick-and-shovel work, the men grabbed tools from the carts and began hacking at the hillside. Striking clocks in Boston, echoed at higher pitch by a ship’s bell, told them it was midnight.

The rhythmic chink of metal on hard ground carried to the Lively, another of those leaky vessels in the British squadron, now anchored astride the Charlestown ferryway. As coral light seeped across the eastern horizon at four a.m. on Saturday, June 17, the graveyard watch officer strained to decipher the odd sounds above the groan of the ship’s yards and the Charles whispering along her hull. He summoned the captain, whose spyglass soon showed hundreds of tiny dark figures tearing at the distant slope with spade and mattock.

The ship beat to quarters. Sailors tumbled from their hammocks, feet clapping across the deck as they ran to their battle stations. A windlass groaned as the crew winched Lively on her cable to align the starboard cannons. A shouted command carried across the gun deck, and tongues of flame burst from the ship in a broadside of 9-pounders. Breeching ropes kept the guns from flying across the deck in recoil; block and tackle ran them forward for the next salvo. Gunners swabbed the smoking barrels, rammed home powder and shot, and another flock of iron balls flew toward Breed’s Hill. Other ships eventually joined in—Glasgow, Symmetry, Falcon, Spitfire, more than seventy guns all told—along with 24-pounders from the Copp’s Hill battery in Boston’s North End.

Dawn, that great revealer of predicaments, had fully disclosed Colonel Prescott’s. Screaming cannonballs—“tea kettles,” in rebel slang—streaked overhead or punched into the hillside, smashing two hogsheads containing the American water supply. “The danger we were in made us think there was treachery, & that we were brought here to be all slain,” young Peter Brown would write his mother in Rhode Island. Distance and elevation reduced the bombardment’s effect, although Prescott recounted how one militiaman whose head abruptly vanished in a crimson mist “was so near me that my clothes were besmeared with his blood and brains, which I wiped off in some degree with a handful of fresh earth.” When other men dropped their tools to gawk at the corpse, Prescott snapped, “Bury him,” then strolled off with conspicuous nonchalance, hatless now, waggling his sword and urging the men to dig faster.

The redoubt taking shape was formidable enough, with thick dirt walls six feet high, fire steps for musketmen inside to stand on, and a sally port exit to the north. But no embrasures had been left for cannons; worse yet, Prescott recognized that the British could outflank him on either side. Gage’s men would no doubt attack in force across the Charles, seeking to stun the defenders with firepower before closing to complete the slaughter with bayonets. To protect his left flank, Prescott ordered the men to begin building a low breastwork northeast from the sally port to marshy ground at the foot of Breed’s Hill.

He also sent an officer to plead for reinforcements, provisions, and water. Artillerymen refused to lend the courier a horse, forcing him to walk four miles to Cambridge, which he found “quiet as the Sabbath.” At Hastings House he discovered Dr. Warren, newly appointed as a major general despite his lack of military experience, splayed on an upstairs bed with a crippling headache. General Ward, tormented with another attack of the stone, fretted over the vulnerability of Roxbury, the Dorchester Heights, and his Cambridge supply dumps; British gunfire had been reported at Boston Neck. Not least, Ward worried that only twenty-seven half-barrels of powder remained in his magazines, perhaps enough for forty thousand cartridges. With consent from the Committee of Safety, he reluctantly agreed to send reinforcements to Prescott from the New Hampshire militia camped along the Mystic.

The deep boom of Lively’s broadsides had wakened General Gage, as it woke all of Boston. Province House, aglitter in candlelight, soon bustled with red uniforms. Messengers skipped up the broad stone steps from Marlborough Street with news of rebel entrenchments, then skipped back down with orders to find and fetch various commanders. Young officers eager to join the coming attack loitered in the hallway, hoping to be noticed. Sleepy aides fumbled about for decent maps, of which the British still had precious few. Concussion ghosts from the harbor bombardment rattled the windows, and the rap of drums beating assembly carried from the camps.

Several senior officers joined Gage in the council chamber, including Percy, who arrived from his house in nearby Winter Street. But it was three newcomers who drew the eye this morning: Major Generals William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton had reached Boston in late May aboard the Cerberus, after a stormy voyage that killed two favorite horses but gave the three men ample time to find common ground for the campaign ahead despite their inevitable rivalry. “The sentiments of Howe, Clinton, and myself have been unanimous from the beginning,” Burgoyne declared. The king had personally approved their selection, fearing that without vigorous new leadership in America “we shall only vegetate.” They were deemed “the fittest men for the service in the army,” as one official in London observed, forming what Burgoyne called “a triumvirate of reputation.”

Others were not so sure. Horace Walpole, ever astringent, told his diary that Howe “was reckoned sensible, though so silent that nobody knew whether he was or not,” while Burgoyne was “a vain, very ambitious man, with a half understanding that was worse than none.” Clinton, he declared, “had not that fault, for he had no sense at all.” Their arrival at Long Wharf aboard a frigate named for the mythical three-headed hound guarding the gates of Hades inspired the war’s most enduring doggerel: “Behold the Cerberus, the Atlantic plough, / Her precious cargo, Burgoyne, Clinton, Howe, / Bow, wow, wow!” Thereafter known as the three bow-wows, they had wasted little time in undercutting Gage’s authority, as in Burgoyne’s barbed observation to General Harvey earlier that week that it was “no reflection to say he is unequal to his present station, for few characters in the world would be fit for it.… It requires a genius of the very first class.”

As the windows trembled and the Old South clock across the street struck the hours, the high command, genius or otherwise, heatedly debated what to do. General Clinton, a dimple-chinned, prickly, and gifted tactician, proposed the boldest course. Early that morning, he had made his own reconnaissance in the dark along the Boston waterfront, listening to the racket from the rebel entrenchment. If Howe and the main British force crossed directly from the North End to Charlestown, Clinton would lead five hundred men ashore in a surprise flanking attack within musket shot of the isthmus, severing the American line of retreat and trapping the enemy on the peninsula.

This scheme found little favor around Gage’s council table. Dividing the force would risk defeat in detail of the separate detachments, particularly if thousands of rebel reinforcements stormed the battlefield from Cambridge. Naval support would be tenuous: even shallow-draft vessels had difficulty in the Mystic, which had not been thoroughly sounded, and a milldam west of Charlestown Neck complicated navigation there. No one had forgotten Diana’s fate in shoal water. Every small boat would be needed to ferry at least fifteen hundred regulars from Boston to Morton’s Point on the peninsula. The amphibious assault would have to be made at “full sea”—high tide, close to three p.m.—so that artillery could be manhandled onto dry land rather than through the muddy shallows.

Gage chose a more conventional, direct assault to be led by Howe, the senior major general. As in the march to Concord, most flanker companies—light infantry and grenadiers—had been peeled from their regiments and collected in special battalions. Ten companies of each would muster at Long Wharf, bolstered by several other regiments. The remaining light infantry and grenadiers, backed by additional regiments, would embark at North Battery, with sundry marines and regulars in reserve.

Gage ended the conference with a stark order: “Any man who shall quit his ranks on any pretense, or shall dare to plunder or pillage, will be executed without mercy.” With a clatter of boots across the floor, officers hurried down the hall and out the door to prepare their commands for battle.

Admiral Graves, meanwhile, had left his flagship to board the seventy-gun Somerset, now anchored in deep water across Boston Harbor. From her gently rocking quarterdeck he could see rebels swarming across the Charlestown hillside around the new earthworks; many were already “entrenched to their chins,” as a British officer noted. Men-of-war belched smoke and noise, and tiny black cannonballs traced perfect parabolas against the summer sky, plumping the fields and splintering tree branches without excessive inconvenience to the Jonathans building their forts. To Graves’s frustration, the waters lapping Charlestown were too shallow for Somerset and other dreadnoughts to warp close; his larger ships would be limited to sending seamen, ammunition, and boats to their smaller sisters.

As the morning ticked by, Glasgow and Symmetry hammered Charlestown Neck from an anchorage west of the peninsula, supported by a pair of scows, each mounting a 12-pounder. But the ebbing tide kept them from nosing near the milldam, and Graves regretted his failure to build more floating batteries and gun rafts. Lively, Falcon, and little Spitfire glided into the Charlestown channel, popping away while preparing to cover Howe’s landing. The roar of the cannonade carried to Cambridge, Roxbury, and other villages; one terrified minister’s wife draped blankets over her windows in hopes of deflecting stray bullets.

Shortly before noon, as meridian heat began to build in Boston, long columns of regulars tramped to fife and drum through the town’s cobbled streets from the Common to the docks. Each man carried, as ordered, sixty rounds, a day’s cooked provisions, and a blanket. The 52nd Foot had been issued gleaming new muskets and bayonets that very morning; they would soon grow filthy with use. By chance, a portion of the 49th Foot had just arrived after a long passage from southern Ireland. Wide-eyed privates, wobbly on their pins after weeks at sea, disembarked on Long Wharf and marched toward the Common with flags flying and drums beating even as the grenadier and light infantry companies from other regiments clambered into the bobbing boats at Long Wharf for the first lift to Charlestown.

At one-thirty p.m., a blue pennant appeared on Preston’s signal halyard. Twenty-eight yawls, longboats, cutters, and ketches carrying twelve hundred soldiers pulled away from Long Wharf in a double column, oars winking in syncopation, with a half dozen brass field guns nestled into the lead boats. The cannonade from the ships had ebbed, but now it grew heavier than ever, balls flying, smoke billowing, and the din reverberating like a terrible thunder. Thousands crowded Boston’s rooftops and hillsides, perching on tree boughs and clinging to steeples. Among the spectators were regulars left behind and the wives of troops now gliding across the Charles. Loyalists and patriots stood together, aware that sons and fathers and lovers were down there somewhere in harm’s way, on the glinting water or the distant hillside.

Here again was an ancient, squalid secret: that war was an enchantment, a sorcery, a seductive spectacle like no other, beguiling the eye and gorging the senses. They looked because they could not look away. Atop Bunker Hill, a Connecticut chaplain named David Avery watched the sculling boats approach Morton’s Point, then raised both arms to heaven before asking God’s indulgence on “a scene most awful and tremendous.”

Astride a lathered white horse, his own halo of tangled white hair instantly recognizable, General Israel Putnam trotted back and forth across the American line in a sleeveless waistcoat, smacking shirkers with the flat of his sword. To an officer pleading with a reluctant militiaman, Putnam snapped, “Run him through if he won’t fight.” One captain would later reflect that Old Put resembled not a field commander so much as the foreman of “a band of sicklemen or ditchers.… He might be brave, and had certainly an honest manliness about him; but it was thought, and perhaps with reason, that he was not what the time required.”

Nine Massachusetts regiments had been ordered to Charlestown from Cambridge, but at best only five had reached the peninsula; the others were delayed, misdirected, or misinformed. No one seemed to have a map. Roads were confusing, the terrain foreign. Troop discipline was “extremely irregular,” one officer wrote, “each regiment advancing according to the opinions, feelings, or caprice of its commander.” Putnam had ordered entrenching tools carried back from the redoubt to belatedly build a fortification on Bunker Hill; eager volunteers grabbed a shovel or an ax, then retreated toward the Neck and beyond, never to return. By one count, fewer than 170 men remained with Prescott to hold his redoubt, officers included. “To be plain,” an observer would write Samuel Adams, “it appears to me there never was more confusion and less command.”

Happily for the American cause, some men knew their business. Colonel Prescott continued to improve his imperfect fort and the adjacent breastwork, positioning men and shouting encouragement. Roughly two hundred yards behind the breastwork, a tall, enterprising captain from eastern Connecticut, Thomas Knowlton, recognized the defensive potential of a rail livestock fence that extended northeast for several hundred yards, from the middle of the peninsula almost to the Mystic. The fence had been laid on a slight zigzag course and assembled with a method known as stake-and-rider; a portion of it straddled a two-foot stone wall. Two hundred men helped Captain Knowlton reinforce the southwestern length of the barrier with additional rails and posts scavenged from other fields. They then stuffed the gaps with haycocks and sheaves of cut grass to give the illusion of a solid parapet. Several small field guns hauled by horses from Cambridge were emplaced nearby.

As the British boats beat from Boston, the most critical rebel reinforcements reached Charlestown Neck to the thrum of fife and drum: hundreds of long-striding New Hampshire militiamen, described as a “moving column of uncouth figures clad in homespun.” Millers, mariners, and husbandmen, they included the largest regiment in New England, commanded by Colonel John Stark, the lean, beetle-browed son of a Scottish emigrant. Stark’s picaresque life had included capture by Indians while hunting in 1752 and his release six weeks later for a hefty ransom. As a Ranger officer in the last French war, he had plodded more than forty miles in snowshoes to fetch help for comrades wounded in an ambush. After surviving the bloody Anglo-American repulse by the French at Fort Carillon in 1758, he and two hundred men subsequently built an eighty-mile road from Crown Point to the Connecticut valley. Upon hearing the news of Lexington, Stark, now forty-six, left his sawmill and his wife, pregnant with their ninth child, and was elected colonel by a unanimous show of hands in a tavern; so many men rallied to him that thirteen companies filled his regiment. At eleven this morning, General Ward’s initial order to reinforce Charlestown reached Stark’s camp in Medford, four miles up the Mystic. As he would tell the New Hampshire Provincial Congress a few days later, “The battle soon came on.”

Stark sent an advance detachment of two hundred men to the peninsula, then tarried long enough at a house converted into an armory for the rest of his force to draw ammunition: fifteen balls, a flint, and a gill cup of powder—five ounces—for each musketman. Crossing the narrow isthmus shortly after two p.m., harassed with round, bar, and chain shot from Royal Navy guns, the Hampshiremen ascended Bunker Hill at a deliberate pace, then descended to the northeast lip of the peninsula. “One fresh man in action,” Stark told a captain, “is worth ten fatigued ones.” A quick glance disclosed the American peril: despite Knowlton’s deft work along the rail fence, and the hasty construction of three small triangular earthworks known as flèches closer to the redoubt, Prescott’s position could still be outflanked by redcoats advancing up the Mystic shoreline. To block the narrow, muddy beach, Stark’s men scooted down the eight-foot riverbank and quickly stacked fieldstones to build a short, stout wall. Most Hampshiremen took positions behind the fence to extend Knowlton’s line, further stuffing it with hay, grass, and stray rails. But sixty musketmen arranged themselves on the beach in a triple row behind the new barricade. There they awaited their enemy.

Thick-featured and taciturn, General Howe in the best of times was said to be afflicted by a “sullen family gloom.” He, too, needed but a glance to see his own dilemma. Landing at Morton’s Point with the second lift of six hundred infantry and artillery troops from North Battery, Howe climbed a nearby hillock as gunners shouldered their fieldpieces onto dry ground and the empty boats rowed back to Boston. “It was instantly perceived the enemy were very strongly posted,” he subsequently told London.

On his far left, rebel gunmen infested rooftops and barns in Charlestown, while up the pasture slopes, five hundred yards from where Howe stood watching with his command group, a large bastion had sprouted from the hillside. The rest of the rebel defenses came into view: the triangular flèches, several guns throwing an occasional ball inaccurately toward the British lines, and the long fence—or was it a wall?—bristling with men stripped to their shirtsleeves. The fields and pastures ended in a short plunge down to the Mystic shoreline. With more rebels clustered atop Bunker Hill and spilling across Charlestown Neck despite the naval gunfire, Howe calculated that he faced “between five and six thousand” Americans—half again their actual number. He sent a courier flying to Province House with a request that Gage send reinforcements immediately; the attack would await their arrival. Redcoats poised to march near Morton’s Point broke ranks, grounded their muskets, and sat in the grass to smoke their pipes or gobble a quick dinner of bread and salt meat.

Howe made his plan. The Mystic beach seemed a promising corridor from which to outflank and turn the rebel line. On foot, the general would personally lead the British right wing, including grenadiers assaulting the rail fence while a column of light infantry companies slashed up that river shoreline. The left wing, led by the diminutive, moonfaced Brigadier Robert Pigot, would attack the redoubt to fix the enemy in place and maybe even overrun the parapet once Howe’s troops had broken through. Celebrated for his sangfroid against the French at Quebec, the Breton coast, and Havana, Howe was quoted as telling his officers, “I shall not desire one of you to go a step farther than where I go myself at your head.” Speed, agility, discipline, and violence would be decisive. Losing Boston, he reminded them, meant moving the entire army onto Graves’s ships, “which will be very disagreeable to us all.”

Including the reserves soon to arrive, Howe commanded more than twenty-six hundred men. British field guns began popping away at three p.m., “great nasty porridge pots flying through the air & crammed as full of devils as they could hold,” as a young militiaman wrote, each ball “whispering along with its blue tail.” The bombardment so unnerved the rebel artillery battery up the slope that one American gun captain reportedly “fired a few times, then swung his hat three times round to the enemy and ceased to fire.” Regulars tamped out their pipes and shouldered their muskets, bayonets fixed. Junior officers bawled out orders. Ten companies abreast would form a broad assault front on Pigot’s wing to the left, followed by ten more, a formation mirrored by Howe’s right wing except for the light infantry column along the Mystic, necessarily squeezed into a shoulder-to-shoulder front between river and riverbank.

On order, the great mass of redcoats heaved forward with a clatter of equipment and more bawling commands, the slate-blue Charles behind them and tawny dust clouds churning up with each stride. “Push on!” the troops yelled. “Push on!” Drummers rapped a march cadence, periodically punctuated by the boom of field guns towed forward with drag ropes. Howe marched with the deliberation of a man who had done this before, his eyes on the hillside ahead, trailed by aides, staff officers, and an orderly said to have carried a silver tray with a decanter of wine. Watching from the redoubt as this red tide advanced, Captain Ebenezer Bancroft of Dunstable, Massachusetts, would give voice to every patriot on the battlefield: “It was an awful moment.”

The moment grew more awful. For two months, Admiral Graves had longed to rain destruction on rebel heads, and while Howe drafted his plan on Morton’s Point, the admiral arrived by barge to note the hazard that enemy snipers in Charlestown posed to Pigot’s left flank. Did General Howe wish “to have the place burned?” Graves asked. As a precaution, brick furnaces aboard several warships had prepared all morning to heat cannonballs. General Howe indeed wished it so. A midshipman hurried to relay the order, and fiery balls soon fell on Charlestown like tiny meteors. Worse destruction came from Copp’s Hill in the North End, where early Boston settlers had once sought refuge from the “great annoyances of Woolves, Rattle-snakes, and Musketos.” British troops had muscled mortars and several mammoth 24-pounders to the edge of the ancient burying ground at Snow and Hill Streets, sixty feet above the Charles. While Generals Clinton and Burgoyne watched, gunners loaded combustible shells known as carcasses, each packed with gunpowder, Swedish pitch, saltpeter, and tallow. The Charlestown meetinghouse, with its slender, towering steeple, provided a conspicuous aiming stake.

The first shell fell short, bursting near the ferry slip. Gunners corrected their elevation, and within minutes “the whole was instantly in flames,” Burgoyne would write. Fire loped through Charlestown’s streets like a thing alive, igniting buildings at the foot of Chestnut Street and around Mauldin’s shipyard. Other structures along the docks followed in quick succession: distilleries, a tannery, warehouses, shipwrights, a cooperage. Fire climbed the pitched roofs—a “grand and melancholy sight,” one loyalist observed—then licked through houses away from the waterfront and up to the marketplace, incinerating the courthouse and the Three Cranes Tavern. North of the market, on Town Hill, more houses and another distillery caught fire. The light breeze shifted from southwest to east, as it often did on fine summer days, and flames drove lengthwise through Charlestown. Fire ignited more wharves and a ship chandlery. Ebony smoke rose in a column as wide as the town, then “hung like a thunder cloud over the contending armies,” an American officer reported. Rebel musketmen scurried from the burning buildings to hide behind stone walls on Breed’s Hill and in a nearby barn.

“The church steeples, being made of timber, were great pyramids of fire above the rest,” wrote Burgoyne, who had a way with words. “The roar of cannon, mortars, musketry, the crash of churches, ships upon the stocks, the whole streets falling together in ruin, to fill the ear.” All in all, the conflagration was “one of the greatest scenes of war that can be conceived.”

Gawkers and gapers now climbed not only Boston rooftops and hillsides, but “the masts of such ships as were unemployed in the harbor, all crowded with spectators, friends and foes, alike in anxious suspense. It was great, it was high-spirited.”

They, too, looked because they could not look away.

The rebels waited, now killing mad. At four p.m., well over two thousand regulars ascended the slope in two distinct corps. Swallows swooped above the hills, and the stench of a cremated town filled the nose. Many militiamen had loaded “buck and ball”—a lead bullet and two or three buckshot, known as “Yankee peas.” “Fire low,” officers told the men. “Aim at their waistbands.” Again noting the brighter tint of the British officers’ tunics—vibrant from more expensive dyes—they added, “Aim at the handsome coats. Pick off the commanders.” In the redoubt, Prescott angrily waved his sword to rebuke several musketmen who were firing at impossible ranges; they were to wait until the enemy was danger close, within six rods or so—a hundred feet. “Aim at their hips,” Prescott ordered. “Waste no powder.” Five hundred yards to the north, at the far end of the rail fence, Stark told his men to hang fire until they could see the regulars’ half-gaiters below their knees. Someone may also have urged waiting till the whites of the enemy’s eyes were visible, an order that had been issued to Austrians, Prussians, and possibly other warring armies earlier in the century.

Howe’s corps, on the British right, found marching through the thigh-high grass difficult: fence after damnable fence forced the lines to stop and dismantle the rails or climb over them. As planned, light infantrymen angled through a shallow dell that led to the Mystic beach, now screened from the broader battlefield by the riverbank. Eleven companies with more than three hundred men funneled into a tight column, four or five men abreast. Beyond a slight curve in the shoreline stood the newly built fieldstone wall, defended by a few dozen rebel musketmen, some kneeling with their gun barrels resting on the stones. Closing at a dog trot to within fifty yards, redcoats from the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers in the vanguard of the column lowered their bayonets and prepared to charge.

A stupendous, searing volley ripped into the British ranks, blowing the fusiliers from their feet. Gunsmoke rolled down a beach upholstered with dying regulars as their comrades stepped over them only to also be shot down. With a third of the Welch Fusiliers wounded, mortally or otherwise, the King’s Own Light Infantry behind them surged forward; they, too, were slaughtered, followed by the 10th Foot, the 52nd Foot, and other light companies trailing them. “It was like pushing a wax candle against a red-hot plate,” the historian Christopher Ward would write. “The head of the column simply melted away.” A man five feet, eight inches tall and weighing 168 pounds had an exterior surface of 2,550 square inches, of which a thousand were exposed to gunfire when he was facing an enemy frontally at close range. Rebel musket balls seemed to fill every square inch of that Mystic corridor, blasting enormous entry wounds into enemies panting for the fieldstone wall. Among the British officers shot, “few had less than three or four wounds,” a captain later wrote home. Men miraculously unharmed by bullets or buckshot were spattered with wedges of tissue, dislodged teeth, and skull fragments. After a final, futile surge, the regulars turned and ran “in a very great disorder,” a witness reported. They left behind ninety-six comrades, dead as mutton.

Howe heard the commotion below the riverbank to his right, but the rail fence just ahead, stiff with hundreds of American gunmen, drew his full attention. As he and the grenadiers took another stride, the top rail erupted in flame and filthy smoke, quickly followed by a volley from the rebel second rank. “The whole line was one blaze,” a young Sudbury militiaman named Needham Maynard later recalled. “They fell in heaps, actually in heaps.… The bodies lay there very thick.” Howe was unhurt, but men on either side of him crumpled. Disemboweled grenadiers, some screaming, some silent, tumbled one atop another. “I discharged my gun three times at the British, taking deliberate aim as if at a squirrel,” wrote Simon Fobes, a nineteen-year-old private from Bridgewater. “I had become calm as a clock.”

Regulars from two trailing regiments hurried forward to fill gaps in the grenadier line only to be gunned down. A crackle of musketry from the three flèches to Howe’s left swept his corps with cross fire. Wounded redcoats dragged themselves through the grass amid shrieks, curses, and plaintive wails for mother. The British return fire tended to fly high: a stand of apple trees behind the American line had few enemy balls embedded in the trunks, but the “branches above were literally cut to pieces,” Captain Henry Dearborn reported. A few lightly wounded rebels reloaded muskets for their upright comrades, trimmed lead bullets to fit odd-sized barrels, or acted as spotters: “There. See that officer?”

Howe pulled his men back briefly to regroup—“long enough for us to clean our guns,” Maynard, the Sudbury militiaman, noted—then heaved forward again only to be smashed once more. “Their officers were shot down,” Maynard added. “There seemed to be nobody to command ’em.” The British wounded included Lieutenant Colonel James Abercrombie, the grenadier commander, shot in the thigh by jittery light infantrymen who had joined the rail-fence fight after the carnage on the beach. Before he died, a week later, Abercrombie would tell London that his own army “gave me a plumper”—a volley—“and killed two officers and three privates,” while wounding twenty others in fratricidal mayhem. The undisciplined light companies, he suggested, “must be drilled before they are carried to action again.” A jeering rebel who recognized the crippled man being helped from the field shouted, “Colonel Abercrombie, are the Yankees cowards?”

A dozen men in Howe’s command retinue were now dead or wounded. “For near a minute,” an officer observed, “he was quite alone.” At last Howe turned and trudged down the hill, unscathed, though his white stockings were slick with British blood. “There was a moment,” he subsequently told General Harvey, “that I never felt before.”

Brigadier Pigot had suffered few casualties in feinting toward the redoubt—cannonballs from the 24-pounders on Copp’s Hill kept defenders crouched beneath their parapet. But now the weight of the British assault necessarily shifted to his corps. Marines, three regiments, and various detached companies pressed toward the crest of Breed’s Hill, bedeviled by fences, stone walls, and what Burgoyne called “a thousand impediments.” Approaching the redoubt, the line was “stopped by some brick kilns and enclosures, and exposed for some time to the whole of its fire,” a British ensign wrote. “And it was here that so many men were lost.”

Volley upon volley crashed from the redoubt and the protruding breastwork so that “the enemy fell like grass when mowed,” a rebel fifer said. Ebenezer Bancroft, the militia captain from Dunstable, observed, “Our first fire was shockingly fatal.” When a well-aimed fusillade ripped into the regulars, a militiaman bellowed, “You have made a furrow through them!” A diarist in the 47th Foot wrote that “for about fifty minutes it resembled rather a continual sheet of lightning and an uninterrupted peal of thunder than the explosion of firearms.” Some regulars used dead redcoats to build their own breastworks. An American captain reported that he fired all thirty-five rounds in his ammunition pouch, and then threw stones.

Among the fallen was Major John Pitcairn, the conqueror of Lexington Common, now dying in the grass from at least one ball in the chest. A major in the 52nd Regiment was described by a subordinate as “lying about ten yards from the redoubt in great agony” from five wounds; three dead captains lay near him. “They advanced towards us in order to swallow us up,” Private Peter Brown told his mother in Rhode Island, “but they found a choaky mouthful of us.” An Irish comrade added, “Diamond cut diamond, and that’s the whole story.”

Not quite, for diamond would now cut back. Bloody but unbowed, William Howe drew up a new plan. With more than five hundred reserve troops preparing to cross the Charles from Boston, he would renew the attack on the redoubt by shifting two regiments and the surviving grenadiers from his own corps to Pigot’s on the left. Companies would advance in tight columns rather than broad assault lines; the regulars would lighten their loads by leaving superfluous kit behind; and they were to attack swiftly, with bayonets only, rather than pausing to shoot and reload. Moreover, eight fieldpieces now on the battlefield would be hauled by drag ropes—each brass 6-pounder weighed a quarter ton—to positions east of the redoubt to batter the defenders. Howe was disgusted to learn that his artillery fire had slackened during the earlier assaults because side boxes on the guns were found to contain 12-pound balls, which were too fat for 6-pound muzzles. He ordered gunners to instead use grapeshot, plum-sized iron balls packed in canvas bags that blew open when fired.

Peering over the parapet from his battered redoubt, Colonel Prescott watched the red tide again creep up the Breed’s pastureland. The 150 or so Americans remaining in his small fort—their faces blackened from soot and powder, as if they’d been toiling in a coal yard—had little ammunition left. Militiamen searched pockets for stray cartridges or tapped the final grains from powder horns, tearing strips from their shirttails for wadding. Prescott ordered the last artillery cartridges torn open and the loose powder distributed to his infantry. Except for a single two-gun battery, the four American artillery companies sent into battle had been all but useless this afternoon, beset with cowardice, confusion, and technical ineptitude. Of six guns that reached the peninsula, five now stood silent and the sixth had been hauled away.

The failure of General Ward’s headquarters to resupply the redoubt was almost as disheartening as the dearth of reinforcements. Among the few doughty souls to arrive in mid-battle was a familiar if unlikely figure. Dr. Joseph Warren—elegantly dressed in a light coat, a white satin waistcoat with silver lace, and white breeches—strode through the sally port gripping a borrowed gun, his earlier headache gone, or ignored, or mended by the huzzahs that greeted him. Despite the high rank conferred several days earlier by the provincial congress, Warren declined offers of command, insisting that he take post in the line with other musketeers.

Up the peninsula, hundreds of leaderless militiamen “in great confusion” ambled about on Bunker Hill or beyond the Neck, a sergeant reported. A few without muskets brandished pitchforks, shillelaghs, and at least one grain flail. Captain John Chester, who had just arrived with his Connecticut company, found chaos: thirty men cowering behind an apple tree; others behind rocks or haycocks; twenty more escorting a single wounded comrade toward Cambridge “when not more than three or four could touch him to advantage. Others were retreating seemingly without any excuse.” One colonel, described as “unwieldy from excessive corpulence,” lay sprawled on the ground, proclaiming his exhaustion. British gunners aboard Glasgow and Symmetry continued to scorch the Neck with iron shot, giving pause to even the lionhearted. “The orders were press on, press on,” wrote Lieutenant Samuel Blachley Webb, now skittering toward the redoubt with Chester’s Connecticut company. “Good God how the balls flew. I freely acknowledge I never had such a tremor come over me before.”

The sun had begun to dip in the southwestern sky, dimmed by the black coils of smoke above Charlestown, when Pigot’s legions again drew near, high-stepping their dead. British grapeshot spattered the earthworks, driving defenders from the parapet even as American fire wounded a dozen gunners shouldering the fieldpieces into position. “They looked too handsome to be fired at,” Corporal Francis Merrifield lamented, “but we had to do it.” Prescott told his men to wait until the British vanguard was within thirty yards of the redoubt walls; on command, militiamen hopped up on their fire steps, and a point-blank volley staggered the enemy ranks again. A ball clipped the skull of Captain George Harris, commanding the 5th Foot grenadier company; dragged through the grass by a lieutenant, Harris cried, “For God’s sake, let me die in peace.” Of four grenadiers who carried him to a nearby copse, three were wounded, one mortally.

But the battle had turned. Regulars pressed close on three sides, leaping across a narrow ditch to hug the berm before scaling the steep ramparts. American gunshots grew scattered; some Jonathans saved their last round to shoot British officers atop the parapet. “Our firing began to slacken. At last it went out like an old candle,” Needham Maynard recalled. More redcoats tumbled into the redoubt, now shooting. “Take their guns away,” Prescott yelled, “twitch ’em away.” Enemies grappled, grunting and swearing. A brown miasma of smoke and churning dust hung in the air. Americans swung their muskets as clubs, fighting “more like devils than men,” a regular reported, and when the walnut stocks shattered, they swung the bent barrels or threw rocks.

Prescott was among the last to escape, “stepping long, with his sword up,” parrying bayonet thrusts that snagged his banyan but not his flesh. Peter Brown scrambled over the wall and ran for half a mile; musket balls, he told his mother, “flew like hail stones.” Captain Bancroft fought his way out, first with a musket butt, then with his fists, bullets nicking his hat and coat and shearing off his left forefinger. Corporal Farnsworth of Groton would tell his diary, “I received a wound in my right arm, the ball going through a little below my elbow.… Another ball struck my back, taking a piece of skin about as big as a penny.… I was in great pain.”

They were the lucky ones. “Nothing could be more shocking than the carnage that followed the storming of this work,” wrote Lieutenant John Waller of the 1st Marines. “We tumbled over the dead to get at the living, who were crowding out of the gorge of the redoubt.…’Twas streaming with blood & strewed with dead and dying men, the soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the brains of others.” Thirty American bodies, some mutilated beyond recognition, lay scattered across the shambles. The triumphant, vengeful roar of British regulars could be heard in Boston.

Lieutenant Webb and his Connecticut militia arrived to see the melee spill from the sally port. “I had no other feeling but that of revenge,” he wrote. “Four men were shot dead within five feet to me.… I escaped with only the graze of a musket ball on my hat.” Dr. Warren did not escape: sixty yards from the redoubt, a bullet hit him below the left eye and blew through the back of his head. He toppled without a word.

By five-thirty p.m., rebel forces were in full retreat up the peninsula, bounding from fence to fence, barn to barn, leaving a debris trail of cartridge boxes, tumplines, goatskin knapsacks, even coats and hats shed in the heat of the day. The wounded hobbled, or were carried on backs or in stretchers fashioned from blankets and muskets. On their heels came not only Pigot’s regiments but Howe’s regular regiments and grenadiers, who had bulled through the breastworks and the three flèches. Also in pursuit was General Clinton, who on his own initiative had crossed the Charles from Copp’s Hill, rallied regulars milling in the rear of Pigot’s corps, then circled north to give chase. “All was in confusion,” he wrote. “I never saw so great a want of order.”

Yet for the rebels, disorder brought salvation. The New Hampshire and Connecticut regiments, seeing the redoubt fall, pulled back from the rail fence in an orderly withdrawal to give covering fire for Prescott’s fugitives. Some militiamen loitering atop Bunker Hill advanced down the slope to pelt the British pursuers with bullets, a belated but vital contribution to the battle. “The retreat was no flight,” Burgoyne would write. “It was even covered with bravery and military skill.” Howe had seen enough and suffered enough: when Clinton confronted him north of the redoubt to urge pursuit to the Neck and beyond, Howe “called me back,” Clinton wrote later, “I thought a little forcibly.”

Americans by the hundreds surged through the gantlet of naval gunfire still scything the only exit from the peninsula. Some died within yards of safety, including Major Andrew McClary, one of Stark’s Hampshiremen, hit with a frigate cannonball. “He leaped two or three feet from the ground, pitched forward, and fell dead upon his face,” an officer reported. But most straggled unharmed onto the high ground beyond the Neck, exhausted and tormented by thirst. General Putnam followed on his white horse, cradling an armful of salvaged entrenching tools. “I never saw such a carnage of the human race,” he would be quoted as saying.

For now the carnage was over, mostly. Rebel snipers in trees and houses across the Neck continued to plink away at enemy pickets, killing a 38th Foot lieutenant with a random shot. The British answered with broadsides from Glasgow and salvos from a 12-pounder. Charlestown burned and burned, painting the low clouds bright orange in what one diarist called “a sublime scene of military magnificence and ruin.” Marines landed in skiffs to set fire to wooden structures that had escaped the earlier flames. Prescott, ever pugnacious, vowed to retake his lost hill that night if given ammunition, bayonets, and three rested regiments. General Ward sensibly demurred.

“Dearest Friend,” Abigail Adams wrote from Braintree to her husband, John, then meeting in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress. “The day, perhaps the decisive day, is come on which the fate of America depends.” She continued:

Charlestown is laid in ashes.… Tis expected they will come out over the Neck tonight, and a dreadful battle must ensue.… The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot eat, drink, or sleep.

Night fell. The British did not come. From Prospect and Winter Hills above the Cambridge road came the excavating sounds of mattock and spade, as militiamen once again stacked their muskets and began to dig the next line of resistance.

British medicos scuffed through the high grass to feel with their feet for the dead and the merely dying, then held their flickering lanterns close to distinguish between the two. Those with a pulse or a glint in the eye were hoisted onto drays and wheeled to barges on the Charles for transport to Boston. “The cries and moans of the dying was shocking,” wrote General Clinton, who also picked his way across the battlefield. “I had conversation with many of these poor wretches in their dying moments.”

Later studies by the British Army would demonstrate that soldiers wearing conspicuous red uniforms were more than twice as likely to be shot in combat as those in muted blues and grays. The tally at Breed’s Hill seemed to anticipate those findings: Gage’s army had regained roughly a square mile of rebel territory at a cost exceeding a thousand casualties, or more than a man lost per acre won. Over 40 percent of the attacking force had been killed or wounded, including 226 dead; losses were especially doleful in the elite flanker companies—the light infantry and grenadiers. Nineteen officers also had been killed. Of all the king’s officers who would die in battle during the long war against the Americans, more than one out of every eight had perished in four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown.

Casualties in some units were calamitous. All but four grenadiers from the King’s Own were killed or wounded. Of thirty-eight men in the 35th Foot light company, only three escaped rebel bullets; with every officer, sergeant, and corporal hit, the senior private led other surviving privates. After sustaining 123 casualties, British marines were nonplussed to find that their tents in Boston had been plundered during the battle, apparently by regulars not in the field. The Admiralty voiced “astonishment that it could have happened” but declined to pay compensation, because of the precedent such reimbursement would set. Howe, who lost virtually his entire staff to death or injury, admitted to General Harvey that when he studied the casualty lists, “I do it with horror.”

Through Saturday night and all day Sunday, as artillery grumbled in the distance, blood-slick wagons, chaises, sedan chairs, wood carts, and barrows hauled broken men from the wharves to makeshift hospitals, barracks, and rooming houses. “The streets were filled with the wounded and the dying, the sight of which, with the lamentations of the women and children over their husbands and fathers, pierced one to the soul,” a British official wrote. A woman in Boston told her brother of watching redcoats hobble through town, tormented by flies and pleading for water, “some without noses, some with but one eye, broken legs and arms.” Shock and hemorrhage killed many before they reached a surgeon’s table; gangrene would kill more. The first coach to the Manufactory House—built two decades earlier for the working poor to make linen and now a general hospital—contained a dying major and three dead captains; the second coach carried four more dead officers. The loyalist judge Peter Oliver encountered a soldier stumbling through town, “his white waistcoat, breeches & stockings being very much dyed by a scarlet hue”; the man told Oliver, “I have three bullets through me,” then tottered off. A captain who arrived from England on Sunday wrote his father of finding “wounded and dead officers in every street. Bells tolling, wounded soldiers lying in their tents and crying for assistance to remove some men who had just expired.… They remained in this deplorable situation for three days.”

Captain George Harris, shot in the head near the redoubt, was saved by trepanning, the boring of a hole in the skull to relieve the pressure from bleeding. Doctors positioned a mirror “so as to give me a sight of my own brain,” he later wrote a cousin. “It may convince you and the rest of the world that I have such a thing.” Others were less jocular. “I have received two balls, one in my groin and the other near the breast,” a wounded soldier wrote his family, according to an account published after the war. “The surgeons inform me that three hours will be the utmost I can survive.” Richard Hope, a surgeon in the 52nd Foot, described how the regiment suffered thirty privates killed in action and eighty wounded, “a fourth part of whom will die.… It would pierce a heart of stone to hear the daily shrieks and lamentations of the poor widows and fatherless left desolate and friendless three thousand miles from home.” The dead included Major Roger Spendlove, who in four decades with the 43rd Foot had survived wounds at Quebec, Martinique, and Havana. Private Clement Nicholson of the 38th Foot had survived a thousand lashes for desertion the previous year, meted out in four ferocious sets of 250, but Bunker Hill would kill him, too.

A physician examining gunshot victims described the “yellowness of the face, paleness of the extremities, a falling of the pulse.” Treatment was not far removed from such medieval remedies as pigeon blood for eye wounds or the liberal use of “oil of whelps,” an ointment made with earthworms, white wine, and the flesh of dogs boiled alive. Surgeons probed wounded arms and legs with their unwashed fingers, feeling for bone fragments, whose presence indicated a need for immediate amputation. A surgical text recommended that a doctor preparing to lop off a man’s limb with a saw “avoid terrifying him with the appearance of the apparatus [and] avoid a useless crowd of spectators.” Lucky patients got a grain of opium or a swig of rum, and their ears stuffed with lamb’s wool to mask the sound of the sawing. Many were less fortunate. Amputations above the knee took only thirty seconds, but no more than half the patients survived the ordeal or the subsequent sepsis. Orderlies sloshed vinegar across the bloody floor and heaved the next patient onto the plank table. As for those shot in the abdomen, a sniff of a lint probe inserted into the wound would reveal whether gut contamination had set in, in which case, a medical text advised, “we lay the patient quietly in bed, there to take his fate.”

“Many of the wounded are daily dying, and many must have both legs amputated,” wrote one surgeon, who asserted that rebel gunmen fired nails and iron scrap to inflict maximum damage. Some had also fired pebbles, but only because they had no more bullets. By one tally, only half of the more than eight hundred wounded regulars would ultimately be declared “cured, fit for service.” Many in the coming months would also be tormented, sometimes fatally, by “the Yanky”—dysentery, in British slang.

A few miles away, the Yankees also suffered. A New Hampshire surgeon who rushed to Cambridge with a bullet extractor of his own design reported, “I amputated several limbs and extracted many balls the first night.” American casualties approached 450, including 138 dead. More than thirty American prisoners, many of them wounded, were dumped at Long Wharf under guard on Saturday night, then jailed the next day; most would be dead by September, foreshadowing the treatment captured Americans could expect in British custody. A surgeon who packed up his instruments in Andover and galloped to Cambridge wrote of the terrible uncertainty besetting a hundred New England towns: “It was not known who were among the slain or living, the wounded or the well.” Those who learned the worst soon submitted sad claims for restitution, like Mary Pierce of Pepperell, the widow of a private in Prescott’s regiment. She requested compensation of five pounds, twelve shillings for his lost coat, trousers, stockings, shoes, buckles, silk handkerchief, knife, and tobacco box.

To many American fighters, the battle now called Bunker Hill felt like defeat. Ground had been given, the peninsula lost. Many were furious at what a Connecticut captain called a “shameful and scandalous” retreat. Rumors spread of betrayal, of treacherous officers, of gunpowder adulterated with sand, “all of which creates great uneasiness in the camp,” a former Boston selectman told his diary. Three artillery companies had performed dismally. Several timid commanders faced court-martial and dismissal from the service. American generalship had been muddled and indecisive, leaving the force “commanded without order and God knows by whom,” a senior officer wrote. Although the Essex Gazette claimed Putnam was “inspired by God Almighty with a military genius,” Colonel Stark denounced him as “a poltroon.” Much blame fell on Artemas Ward, “a general destitute of all military ability,” in the opinion of the new president of the provincial congress, James Warren.

The incineration of Charlestown, the first of several American towns to be obliterated during the war, stirred both sorrow and rage. A survey found that 232 houses, 95 barns, 76 shops, 25 warehouses, a dozen mills, 81 miscellaneous buildings, and 17 wharves had burned, with losses exceeding £100,000. Of 450 eventual claims, some came from Bostonians who had moved their household goods to Charlestown for safekeeping, like Sarah Hunstable, who lost nine feather beds, six mahogany chairs, three looking glasses, and more. A church census calculated that two thousand residents had been consigned to “the most aggravated exile.”

Yet the battle would soon be seen as a triumph of patriot moxie. “I wish [we] could sell them another hill at the same price,” observed a new brigadier general from Rhode Island named Nathanael Greene. The lawyer William Tudor wrote John Adams on June 26, “The ministerial troops gained the hill, but were victorious losers. A few more such victories, and they are undone.” Even if Prescott and his comrades were not “supported in a proper manner,” wrote Samuel Gray from Roxbury, “this battle has been of infinite service to us—made us more vigilant, watchful, and cautious.” Bunker Hill also reinforced the conviction that inflamed citizen soldiers, summoned to battle from field or shop, could hold their own against professional legions, a charming myth that took deep root and would nearly prove the undoing of America. Cheeky rebels soon appropriated a scornful British ditty to serve as a defiant American anthem. “‘Yankee Doodle’ is now their paean, a favorite of favorites,” a British officer said, “esteemed as warlike as ‘The Grenadiers’ March.’”

For days, Yankees with spyglasses in Roxbury and on Dorchester Heights watched the regulars dig graves. With so many dead men to bury, Gage ordered the mourning bells in Boston silenced. Fallen officers like Major Pitcairn found graves in sanctified ground at Old North or in other churchyards. Their effects were quickly auctioned off in officers’ messes or, as in the case of Lieutenant Colonel Abercrombie, at “the large tree in front of the encampment of the 22nd Regiment”: swords, pistols, silk waistcoats, fancy hats, mattresses, spurs, all sold to the highest bidder. Page after page of new promotion announcements soon appeared; there was nothing like a bloodletting to advance careers.

Privates were laid in a common pit on the marshy ground between Breed’s and Bunker Hills, then dusted with twenty barrels of quicklime. Many who died of their wounds were consigned to trenches on Boston Common. The American dead on the peninsula were dumped without ceremony into mass graves or hasty bury holes, including Joseph Warren, interred with an anonymous companion in a farmer’s frock. Captain Walter Laurie, who had commanded the star-crossed detachment at Concord Bridge, told London that his burial detail had found Warren’s body and “stuffed the scoundrel with another rebel into one hole, and there he & his seditious principles may remain.” Grave robbing became so pernicious on the peninsula that Howe threatened severe punishment for malefactors. “Added to the meanness of such a practice,” he warned, “a pestilence from the infection of the putrefied bodies might reach the camp.”

Midsummer gloom pervaded that camp, despite efforts to depict the battle as a triumph. “Another such,” Clinton said, “would have ruined us.” A cynical officer suggested that the rebels should plan “to lose a battle every week ’til the British army was reduced to nothing.” On June 23, Gage ordered an assault on Dorchester Heights, then quickly canceled the attack, convincing himself that he could command the heights with artillery if necessary. Resentments festered among his officers, at the combat shortcomings of their rank and file—“discipline, not to say courage, was wanting,” Burgoyne sniffed—and at the high command. “From an absurd and destructive confidence, carelessness, or ignorance, we have lost a thousand of our best men and officers,” a seething officer wrote. “We were all wrong at the head.”

Gage waited eight days to tell London of Bunker Hill, in a nineteen-sentence dispatch that was spare to the point of duplicity. “This action,” he asserted, “has shown the superiority of the king’s troops who … defeated above three times their own number.” An oversized casualty chart with perfectly lined columns contained delicate calligraphic flourishes on the k’s and w’s that at least gave ornamentation to the killed and wounded. But in a private note to Lord Dartmouth, Gage conceded that casualties were “greater than our force can afford to lose.… The rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be.… Your Lordship will perceive that the conquest of this country is not easy.” In a letter to Barrington on June 26, Gage added, “These people … are now spirited up by a rage and enthusiasm as great as ever people were possessed of.” He continued:

You must proceed in earnest or give the business up. The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear. Small armies can’t afford such losses.… I wish this cursed place was burned.

The news stunned England. Newspapers promptly published maps of Bunker Hill, which were studied intently by fretful readers. “The ministers now saw America was lost, or not to be recovered but by long time and expense,” Walpole told his journal. “Yet, not daring to own their miscarriage, pushed on.” Rumors circulated that fratricide had caused half of all British losses, that regulars had thrown down their arms rather than fight, that a disgraced General Gage had returned to England dressed as his wife. In fact, Margaret Kemble Gage came home dressed as herself aboard the three-masted Charming Nancy, accompanying sixty widows and orphans, plus 170 badly wounded soldiers. Correspondents who met the ship in Plymouth described “a most shocking spectacle,” including “some without legs, and others without arms, and their clothes hanging on them like a loose morning gown.” Many were said to be “in a state of complete alcoholic dependence.” The Plymouth guildhall collected donations for the widows—sixteen shillings each. One writer, upon viewing this homecoming, concluded that “60,000 men would not be able to bring the Americans under subjection.” William Eden wrote Lord North, “If we have eight more such victories, there will be nobody left to bring the news of them.”

The king held firm, of course. For months British newspapers would chronicle the presentation of wounded officers at court, as in this announcement: “Yesterday Captain Cockering, who lost his arm at Bunker’s Hill, was introduced to His Majesty at St. James’s.… His Majesty was pleased to present him with a captain’s commission in a company of invalids.” The king also decided, as Barrington informed Gage, that injury compensation would be paid, retroactive to Lexington. An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year’s pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year’s pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were “deemed slain in battle.” No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

Another deranged afternoon had come and gone in Massachusetts, and yet that awful Saturday lingered for every man in harm’s way. “Some other mode must be adopted than gaining every little hill at the expense of a thousand Englishmen,” Glanville Evelyn of the King’s Own told his family. Just before midnight on June 17, Evelyn had taken a moment to write his will, philosophically reflecting that those in “the profession of arms hold their lives by a more precarious tenure than any other body of people.”

As Captain Evelyn pondered the future, others tried to forget the past. Reverend David Osgood, a New Hampshire regimental chaplain, would recall as an old man how for the remaining eight years of war after Bunker Hill “a burden lay upon my spirits.… Visions of horror rose in my imagination, and disturbed my rest.” A British officer in the 63rd Regiment of Foot could only agree. “The shocking carnage that day,” Major Francis Bushill Sill wrote in a letter home, “never will be erased out of my mind ’till the day of my death.”