Читать книгу The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson - Страница 16

CAMBRIDGE CAMP, JULY–OCTOBER 1775

A sultry overcast thickened above the American encampments on Sunday morning, July 2. By order of General Ward, company officers had begun scrutinizing their troops during daily formation for signs of smallpox. Militiamen marched to prayer services for yet another sermon on the evils of profanity. At General Putnam’s suggestion, they sometimes shouted Amen! loud enough to alarm British sentries.

Even on the Sabbath, British cannons pummeled Roxbury. “The balls came rattling through the houses,” a soldier told his diary. “They neither killed nor wounded any of our men, which seems almost impossible.” The Yankees answered with a pointless spatter of musketry. Heavy rain began to fall at eleven a.m., sharpening the camp odors of green firewood, animal manure, and human waste. Private Samuel Haws updated his journal: “July 1. Nothing remarkable this day. July 2. Ditto.” Private Phineas Ingalls was a bit more descriptive in his Sunday diary entry: “Rained. A new general from Philadelphia.”

Possibly not one of the seventeen thousand soldiers now under his command in Massachusetts knew what George Washington of Virginia looked like. Few Americans did. Imaginary portraits that bore no resemblance to him had been sketched and printed in the penny sheets after his unanimous selection by the Continental Congress seventeen days earlier to be “general and commander-in-chief of the American forces,” a host to be known as the Continental Army. Now here he was in the flesh, trotting past the sodden pickets just after noon with a small cavalry escort and baggage that included a stack of books on generalship, notably Military Instructions for Officers Detached in the Field and a volume with copperplate diagrams on how to build fortifications and otherwise run a war. At Hastings House, a dour Ward handed over his orderly book to the man Private Haws soon called “Lesemo,” a perversion of generalissimo. No salute was fired; the Lesemo’s new army could not spare the powder.

“His personal appearance is truly noble and majestic, being tall and well-proportioned,” wrote a doctor in Cambridge. “His dress is a blue coat with buff-colored facings, a rich epaulet on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword, a black cockade in his hat.” At age forty-three, he was all that and more: over six feet tall, but so erect he seemed taller; nimble for a large man, as demonstrated on many a dance floor, and so graceful in the saddle that some reckoned him the finest horseman of the age; fair skin that burned easily, lightly spattered with smallpox pits and stretched across high cheekbones beneath wide-set slate-blue eyes; fine hair with a hint of auburn, tied back in a queue. He had first lost teeth in the French and Indian War, symptomatic of the perpetual dental miseries that kept him from smiling much. “His appearance alone gave confidence to the timid and imposed respect on the bold,” in one soldier’s estimation, or, as a Connecticut congressman observed, “No harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm.” Abigail Adams, who would invite Washington to coffee soon after his arrival, told her husband, John, “Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” Clearly smitten, she paraphrased the English poet John Dryden: “Mark his majestic fabric! He’s a temple / Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine.” John Adams, in turn, noted that Washington “possessed the gift of silence,” a virtue rarely found in Lawyer Adams.

Washington’s other traits, if less visible, would soon become conspicuous enough to those he commanded. Born into Virginia’s planter class, he was ambitious and dogged, with a resolve that made him seem tireless. If unquestionably brave, diligent, and sensible, he could also be humorless, aloof, and touchy about his lack of formal education. Those military books in his kit were merely the latest texts of a lifelong autodidact; as a youth he had famously copied 110 maxims from the English translation of a Jesuit etiquette manual, including, “Let your countenance be pleasant but in serious matters somewhat grave.… Do not puff up in the cheeks, loll not out the tongue.… Cleanse not your teeth with the tablecloth.” As a twenty-three-year-old colonel commanding Virginia’s provincial forces in the last French war, he had been with Braddock—and Thomas Gage—for the disaster on the Monongahela, surviving four bullets through his uniform, another through his hat, and two horses shot dead beneath him, before dragging his mortally wounded commander across the river and riding sixty miles for help in covering the British retreat. That ordeal—more than four hundred British dead, including wounded men scalped or burned alive—gave Washington a tincture of indestructibility while convincing him that “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence” had protected him “beyond all human probability.”

He had shed the uniform in 1758, telling his officers, “It really was the greatest honor of my life to command gentlemen who made me happy in their company and easy by their conduct.” Over the subsequent seventeen years, he paid little attention to military matters. Yet that experience of observing British commanders, organizing military expeditions, and leading men in battle had served Washington well. He was a talented administrator, with a brain suited to executive action, thanks to a remarkable memory, a knack for incisive thinking and clear writing, and a penchant for detail, learned first as a young officer and then practiced daily as suzerain of his sprawling, complex estate on the Potomac River at Mount Vernon. His fortunes, personal and pecuniary, grew considerably in 1759 when he married Virginia’s richest widow, the amiable and attractive Martha Dandridge Custis. Over the years, their convenient business arrangement had become a love match.

Great responsibility would enlarge him. His youthful vainglory—“I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound,” he had written his brother in 1754—had been supplanted by a more mature reflection that those charming bullets meant dead boys and sobbing mothers. War at its core, he acknowledged, was “gloom & horror.” Once keen to advance himself and his interests, whether as a land speculator or a young colonel on the make, he now displayed a becoming, if artful, modesty. He was seen as “noble and disinterested,” in John Adams’s phrase: ecumenical, judicious, formal but not regal, emblematic of republican virtues in sacrificing personal interest to the greater public good, yet elevated above the republican riffraff. As a passionate supporter of the American cause, a well-connected and native-born political figure, and a man “strongly bent to arms,” in his phrase, Washington was all but the inevitable choice to become commander in chief. Although he refrained from overtly angling for the post, he had worn his Virginia militia uniform in Congress to remind his fellow delegates of his combat experience. He had declined the offer of a $500 monthly salary, accepting only reimbursement for his expenses. From ferry fares and saddle repairs to grog and Madeira, those would be carefully logged in his account ledgers, beginning with the five horses and the light phaeton he bought before leaving Philadelphia.

Washington professed to be fighting for “all that is dear and valuable in life” against a British regime intent on “despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us”—a curious sentiment from someone who owned 135 slaves, including the intrepid Billy Lee, purchased for £61 and now at his side in Cambridge. Clearly he nursed resentments: at the preference given British land speculators, the imperial restrictions on western expansion, and the large debts accumulated with British merchants. Twice he had tried to ascend from the Virginia provincials by securing regular commissions for himself and his officers, and twice he had been snubbed. British tax policies jeopardized his commercial ambitions and offended his moral equilibrium; the royal governor in Virginia had threatened, through a technicality, to annul land grants issued twenty years earlier, which would have stripped Washington of twenty-three thousand wilderness acres.

Yet just as clearly he saw the glory of the American cause: a continental empire to be built upon republican ideals, buttressed with American mettle, ambition, and genius. He also knew that it could all end badly on a Tower Hill scaffold, as it had for the Jacobite rebels of 1745. Thousands had been arrested and at least eighty hanged or beheaded; some of their skulls were still displayed on spikes at Temple Bar in central London. As a precaution, Washington had drafted his will before leaving Philadelphia.

Few would guess that the imposing, confident figure who rode into Cambridge that Sunday afternoon concealed his own anxieties and insecurities. In tears he had told a fellow Virginian, Patrick Henry, “From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.” He also lamented leaving Martha alone in Virginia. “It has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service,” he wrote her. “I go fully trusting in the Providence, which has been more bountiful to me than I deserve.… I retain an unalterable affection for you, which neither time or distance can change.” To his brother he confided, “I am embarked on a wide ocean, boundless in its prospect & from whence, perhaps, no safe harbor is to be found.”

Washington would soon move his headquarters into the vacant Vassall House in Cambridge, a gray, three-story Georgian mansion that had been abandoned by its loyalist owner. The orchards, outbuildings, and sweeping vista of the Charles evoked his beloved Mount Vernon, although the house had been used by medicos after Bunker Hill and then as a bivouac by a Marblehead regiment; sanding grease and filth from the floors took more than a week. Washington chose a high-ceilinged, ground-floor room with Delft tile for his bedchamber, parked his new phaeton and saddle horses in the stable, and then set out to fulfill his marching orders from Congress: “take every method in your power, consistent with prudence, to destroy or make prisoners of all persons who are now, or who hereafter shall appear in arms against the good people of the United Colonies.” Greene, the young Rhode Island general, would later observe of Washington’s arrival, “It seemed as if the spirit of conquest breathed through the whole army.”

Washington needed little time to grasp the lay of the land. The former surveyor’s mahogany-and-brass spyglass showed two armies barely a mile apart, squinting “at one another like wildcats across a gutter,” in one officer’s description. The enemy was “strongly entrenched on Bunker’s Hill,” Washington wrote on July 10 to John Hancock, who as new president of the Continental Congress would be his primary correspondent in Philadelphia. Charlestown Neck had been ditched, palisaded, and fraised to thwart an American attack. White British tents covered the peninsula, and three floating batteries on the Mystic commanded the isthmus. In Roxbury, felled trees and earthen parapets blocked the Neck; many of the buildings that were still standing had been smashed or burned by incessant enemy cannonading. Washington’s own “troops of the United Provinces of North America,” as he grandly called them, occupied more than 230 buildings from Cambridge to Brookline, two dozen of which were used as hospitals. The enemy’s strength was reckoned at 11,500—almost twice the number Gage actually had fit for duty. “Between you and me,” Washington wrote a Virginia friend, “I think we are in an exceeding dangerous situation.”

Commands cascaded from his headquarters, the first of twelve thousand orders and letters to be issued in his name over the next eight years. Officers of the guard were to stop bantering with British sentries. All strongpoints must be defended; officers were to examine batteries to be sure that American guns were actually pointed toward the enemy. Pikes should be “greased twice a week,” and thirteen-foot lances would be made to complement the hundreds of shorter spears already ordered, though chestnut and other brittle wood ought to be avoided. Blacksmiths were authorized to work on Sundays. Because so few Yankees wore uniforms, rank would be color-coded: senior field-grade officers were to wear red or pink cockades in their hats; captains would wear yellow or buff; subalterns, green. A strip of red cloth pinned on the shoulder signified a sergeant; green indicated a corporal. Generals wore chest sashes: purple for major generals, pink for brigadiers, light blue for the commander in chief. Washington agreed to be called “your excellency,” despite private grumbling about the imperial implication. “New lords, new laws,” the troops told one another.

The Continental Congress had appointed thirteen lesser generals, mostly New Englanders, to serve under His Excellency. The only three who could be considered professional military veterans were former British officers—none had risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel—who had recently thrown in with the rebels. Washington quickly organized his army into three “grand divisions,” each commanded by a major general and composed of two brigades, typically with six regiments apiece. Ward led the division on the right wing, around Boston Neck. Putnam commanded the center, at Cambridge. The division on the left wing, overlooking Bunker Hill and ruined Charlestown, was led by Charles Lee, a brusque, vivid eccentric who had spent a quarter century in the king’s service before immigrating to America in 1773. Rather than the twenty-five thousand troops he had expected, Washington found—after excruciating efforts to get a reliable tally—that his host had less than fourteen thousand men actually present and fit for duty around Boston.

For every moment when Washington drew his sword or spurred his horse to the sound of the guns, there would be a thousand administrative moments: dictating orders, scribbling letters, convening meetings, hectoring, praising, adjudicating. No sooner had he settled into Vassall House than he recognized that he personally needed to oversee the smallest aspects of the army’s operation, from camp kettles to bread quality to the $333 paid an unidentified spy—and logged in his expense book in mid-July—“to go into the town of Boston … for the purpose of conveying intelligence of the enemy’s movements and designs.” He quickly saw that unlike the fantasy army that existed in congressional imaginations—grandly intended, as Washington’s commission declared, “for the defense of American liberty and for repelling every hostile invasion thereof”—this army was woefully unskilled; bereft of artillery and engineering expertise, it was led by a very thin officer corps. “We found everything exactly the reverse of what had been represented,” General Lee complained. “Not a single man of ’em is [capable] of constructing an oven.” Washington also recognized that his own five years as a callow regimental officer had left him, as he wrote, with “the want of experience to move upon a large scale”; like every other American commander, he knew little of cavalry, artillery, the mass movement of armies, or how to command a continental force. Still, service under British officers had deeply imprinted him with European orthodoxy, including strong preferences for offensive warfare, firepower, logistical competence, and rigid discipline. He was no brigand chieftain.

Even as he immersed himself in tactical minutiae, Washington recognized that a commander in chief must be a capable strategist; that brass spyglass had to focus on the horizon as much as on the local battlefield. War, he knew, was a struggle of political wills. Winning a war did not require winning every battle; the French war had proved that. Tactical developments often had little influence on strategic success. And Washington was—instinctively, brilliantly—a political general: in the month following his departure from Philadelphia, he wrote seven letters to Congress, acknowledging its superior authority while maneuvering to get what he needed. He used all the tools of a deft politico: flattery, blandishment, reason, contrition. More letters went to colonial governors. Congress had adopted the New England militia as a national force, to be augmented with regiments from other colonies, and he was aware that placing a southerner in command of this predominately northern army was a fragile experiment in continental unity.

The coming weeks and months required intimacy with his army, building the mystical bond between leader and led. Who were they? What did they believe? Why did they fight? How long would they fight? Washington would personify the army he commanded, no small irony given the despair and occasional contempt it caused him. That army would become both the fulcrum on which the fate of the nation balanced and the unifying element in the American body politic, a tie that bound together disparate interests of a republic struggling to be born. It was the indispensable institution, led by the indispensable man, and the coupling of a national army with its commander marked the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution. “Confusion and discord reigned in every department,” Washington wrote in late July. “However we mend every day, and I flatter myself that in a little time we shall work up these raw materials into good stuff.”

Raw indeed. “We were all young,” a twenty-one-year-old captain would write, “and in a manner unacquainted with human nature, quite novices in military matters, had everything to learn, and no one to instruct us who knew any better than ourselves.” If mostly literate, they were barely educated. “What I had learnt,” wrote Stephen Olney, a soldier from Rhode Island, “was mostly rong.” The camps were full of Old Testament names: Joshua, Jabez, Ezekiel, Amos, Caleb, Nathan, Nehemiah. Guided by that ancient text, many concluded that Gage was Pharaoh, if not the Antichrist, confronted by a Chosen People who in the past three months had killed or wounded fourteen hundred British Philistines. Some, of course, were here for the six and two-thirds dollars paid each month to privates, more money than a farm laborer might earn. Others were animated by an inchoate patriotism on behalf of a nation that did not yet exist. And more than one sought “to make a man of himself,” as was said of seventeen-year-old Jeremiah Greenman, also from Rhode Island.

“Discipline,” Washington had written in 1757, “is the soul of an army.” Certainly this army was still looking for its soul. American troops, one visitor claimed, were “as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier.” Each man lived in “a kennel of his own making.” No two companies drilled alike, and together on parade they were described as the finest body of men ever seen out of step. Their infractions were legion: singing on guard duty, voiding “excrement about the fields perniciously,” promiscuous shooting for the sake of noise, a tendency by privates to debate their officers, “unnecessary drum beating at night,” insolent “murmuring,” pilfering thirty bushels of cherries, thirty barrels of apples, and five hundred cabbages from one Chelsea farmer alone. When a small reward was offered for each British cannonball retrieved so that they could be reused, “every ball, as it fell, was surrounded with a great number of men to see who would get it first,” a lieutenant in Roxbury reported. Several lost their feet before the bounty was canceled.

The junior officers were not much better, notably those who used soldiers for personal farm labor, or falsified company returns to draw extra provisions, or pointed cocked pistols at their sergeants. Some officers, a Washington aide wrote in mid-August, were “not only ignorant and litigious but scandalously disobedient.” Many regiments elected their captains, lieutenants, and even lowly subalterns, often on the basis of civilian friendships, social rank, or political influence; the army was said to suffer from a “nightmare of liberty,” inimical to executive power. As for senior officers, few issues plagued Washington more than the endless jockeying for rank. Brigadier generals sulked and bickered all summer over seniority. When one threatened to resign in a snit, Lee wrote him in late July, “For God Almighty’s sake … for the sake of your country, of mankind, and let me add of your own reputation, discard such sentiments.” John Trumbull, a soldier, artist, and the son of Connecticut’s governor, wrote while serving in Roxbury, “Officers grumbling about rank and soldiers about pay, everyone thinking himself ill-used and imposed upon.”

For hours and days on end, Washington rode from Chelsea to Roxbury and back—inspecting, correcting, fuming—then returned to Vassall House to issue another raft of detailed, exhortatory commands. In the three months following his arrival in Cambridge, the commander in chief on five occasions, in general orders, condemned excessive drinking. Four times he demanded better hygiene. Thirteen times he pleaded for accurate returns from subordinate commanders to gauge the size and health of the army. Company rolls were to be called twice daily, and orders read aloud to ensure comprehension, if not obedience. No man was to appear on sentry duty who was “not perfectly sober and tolerably observing,” nor was anyone to appear in formation “without having on his stockings and shoes.” Fines were levied: a shilling for swearing, two shillings sixpence for unauthorized gunplay. Courts-martial dealt swift justice to erring officers. More than two dozen would be convicted in Washington’s first months of command, for offenses ranging from cowardice or other misbehavior at Bunker Hill—five officers found guilty—to defrauding men of their pay, embezzling provisions, and stabbing a subordinate. Most were cashiered in disgrace.

Washington’s conceptions of military justice had been shaped by his years under stern British command. In the spring of 1757 alone, he had approved floggings averaging six hundred lashes each—enough to cripple a man, or even kill him—and presided over courts-martial that imposed more than a dozen death sentences. Such draconian measures were impossible in an army saturated with democratic principles, and Congress stayed his hand by restricting floggings to thirty-nine stripes (soon to be increased to a hundred, at his insistence). If a bit less vindictive, the cat-o’-nine-tails still fell routinely across the backs of convicted men tied to a whipping post known as the “adjutant’s daughter.” “Saw two men whipt for stealing,” a corporal wrote. “O what a pernicious thing it is for a man to steal and cheat his feller nabors, and how provoking to God!” A deserter was not hanged or jailed but sentenced to clean latrines for a week while wearing a sign printed with his offense. A felonious sergeant was drummed from camp with the epithet “MUTINY” on his back.

“My greatest concern is to establish order, regularity & discipline,” Washington wrote Hancock. “My difficulties thicken every day.” In truth, an immensely wealthy man to the manner born, with scores of slaves to tend his business in his absence, could hardly comprehend the sacrifice made by most of his men in leaving their families, shops, and farms in high season. For that vital link between commander and commanded to be welded imperishably, Washington would have to know in his bones—and the men would have to know that he knew—what was risked and what was lost in serving at his side.

Many small, private tragedies, unseen by his spyglass, would play out over the coming months and years. “News of the death of my child,” Lieutenant Benjamin Craft told his journal on August 14. “I hope it will have a sanctifying effect on me and my poor wife. I hope God will enable us to bear all he shall lay upon us.” Many were lonely, and fretful for the families they had forsaken. Captain Nathan Peters had recently lost two young children when he left his surviving one-year-old and his pregnant wife, Lois, in Medfield. She was to run their saddlery while he went to war. “Pray write every opportunity, for I live very lonesome,” Lois wrote him that summer. “Without some money we cannot carry on the trade any longer, for we have laid out all the money we had for leather.… My heart aches for you and all our friends there.… Our corn looks well.”

Yet Washington complained in August of “an unaccountable kind of stupidity … among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the army, who are nearly of the kidney with the privates.” New England troops generally “are an exceeding dirty & nasty people,” he wrote in confidence to Lund Washington, his cousin and the manager of Mount Vernon. “I need not,” he added, “make myself enemies among them by this declaration.” In short, His Excellency faced “so many great and capital errors & abuses … that my life has been nothing else (since I came here) but one continued round of annoyance & fatigue.”

The army surely had far to travel, but so, too, did its commander.

Aggressive and even reckless, Washington longed for a decisive, bloody battle that would cause Britain to lose heart and sue for a political settlement. That appeared unlikely in Boston, where “it is almost impossible for us to get to them,” he wrote. Instead, the summer and fall would be limited to skirmishes, raids, and sniping. “Both armies kept squibbing at each other,” wrote the loyalist judge Peter Oliver, “but to little purpose.”

American whaleboats continued to bedevil Admiral Graves, who warned “all seafaring people” that rebels were trying to lure British ships into shoal water with “false lights.” After raiders burned part of the tall stone lighthouse on Little Brewster Island, a rocky speck eight miles east of Boston, Graves sent carpenters guarded by almost three dozen marines to make repairs and relight the beacon. At two a.m. on Monday, July 31, a British sergeant roused the detachment there with a strangled cry, “The whaleboats are coming!” More than three hundred baying Yankees in thirty-three boats, led by Major Benjamin Tupper of Rhode Island, pulled for the shoreline. Marines stumbled to the water’s edge, “though not without great confusion,” a British midshipman recorded, “many of them in liquor and totally unfit.”

Rebel musket balls peppered the wharf and the stone tower, killing a marine lieutenant and several others. A few workmen escaped by swimming toward warships in Lighthouse Channel, but most were captured, along with twenty-four marines. Raiders seized the lantern and lamp oil, then set fire to the outbuildings, the keeper’s house, and the tower staircase before rowing to the mainland to receive Washington’s praise for their “gallant and soldierlike behavior.” One patriot observed that “the once formidable navy of Britain [is] now degraded to a level with the corsairs of Barbary.” The British Army tended to agree. “The admiral [is] thought much to blame,” Gage’s aide reported, while General Burgoyne was even harsher in a letter to London: “It may be asked in England, ‘What is the admiral doing?’ … I can only say what he is not doing.” Graves seethed, and plotted his revenge against the rebels.

Yet squibbing would not winkle the British from Boston, nor provoke them to give battle. Moreover, Washington could hardly wage a protracted campaign, given that his army was short of virtually everything an army needed: camp kettles, entrenching tools, cartridge boxes, straw, bowls, spoons. “The carpenters will be obliged to stand still for want of nails,” a supply officer warned, while another advised in late July, “We are in want of soap for the army.” American troops—badly housed, badly clothed, and badly equipped—were at war with the world’s greatest commercial and military power, long experienced in expeditionary administration. As an ostensible national government, Congress had begun to improvise the means to fight that war, from printing money and raising regiments to collecting supplies. But the effort thus far seemed disjointed and often half-baked. Although Congress had appointed quartermaster and commissary chiefs, the jobs were neither defined nor supported, and other critical supply posts—notably for ordnance and clothing—would not be created for another eighteen months.

Simply feeding the regiments around Boston had become perilous. Commissary General Joseph Trumbull, a Harvard-educated merchant and another of the Connecticut governor’s sons, frantically tried to organize butchers, bakers, storekeepers, and purchasing agents. Coopers were needed to make barrels for preserved meat, and salt—increasingly scarce—was wanted to cure it. Forage, cash, and firewood also grew scarce; an inquiry found that much of the “beef” examined was actually horse. To feed the army through the following spring, Trumbull told Washington, he needed 25,000 barrels of flour, 13,000 barrels of salt beef and pork, 28,000 bushels of peas or beans, 11 tons of fresh beef three times a week, and 22,000 pints of milk, plus 200 barrels of beer or cider, every day, at a total cost of £200,000. By late September, as prices spiraled and supply agents rode to New York to beg for flour, Trumbull worried that by spring the army would face starvation and thus have to disband. “A commissary with twenty thousand gaping mouths open full upon him, and nothing to stop them with,” he wrote, “must depend on being devoured himself.”

But no shortage was as perilous as that discovered in early August. Washington’s staff calculated that an army of twenty thousand men, in thirty-nine regiments with a hundred cannons, required two thousand barrels of gunpowder—a hundred tons. Powder was the unum necessarium, as John Adams wrote, the one essential. Each pound contained roughly seven thousand grains, enough for a volley from forty-eight muskets. A big cannon throwing a 32-pound ball required eleven or twelve pounds of powder per shot; an 18-pounder used six or seven pounds. A survey taken soon after Washington’s arrival reported 303 barrels in his magazines, or fifteen tons—enough to stave off a British attack, but too little for cannonading. “We are so exceedingly destitute,” he told Hancock, “that our artillery will be of little use.”

Precisely how destitute became clear from the report laid before the war council that convened at Vassall House on Thursday, August 3. The earlier gunpowder estimate had erroneously included stocks used at Bunker Hill and in various prodigal skirmishes over the summer. Despite generous shipments to Cambridge from other colonies, the actual supply on hand, including the powder in all New England magazines, totaled 9,937 pounds, less than five tons, or enough for about nine rounds per soldier. Washington was gobsmacked. “The general was so struck that he did not utter a word for half an hour,” Brigadier General John Sullivan told the New Hampshire Committee of Safety. “Everyone else was equally surprised.” When he finally regained his tongue, Washington told his lieutenants that “our melancholy situation” must “be kept a profound secret.” This dire news, he added, was “inconceivable.”

More orders fluttered from the headquarters, along with desperate pleas. “Our situation in the article of powder is much more alarming than I had the most distant idea of,” Washington wrote Congress on Saturday. “The existence of the army, & the salvation of the country, depends upon something being done for our relief, both speedy and effectual.” Every soldier’s cartridge box was to be inspected each evening; some regiments levied one-shilling fines for each missing round. Civilians were asked “not to fire a gun at beast, bird, or mark without real necessity.” Even the camp reveille gun should be silenced. Desperate raids were contemplated, to Halifax or Bermuda. Pleading “the most distressing want,” Massachusetts requested powder from New York, which replied that it, too, was “afflicted and astonished,” with less than a hundred pounds for purchase.

A rebel schooner from Santo Domingo, in the West Indies, sailed up the Delaware River in late July under a false French flag with almost seven smuggled tons hidden in the hold beneath molasses barrels. Loaded into a half dozen wagons, the powder was promptly sent north with an armed escort. A second consignment of five tons soon followed, and by late August Washington had enough for twenty-five rounds per soldier, still a paltry amount. War could not be waged with an occasional smuggled windfall, yet not a single American powder mill existed when the rebellion began. Mills operating during the French war had fallen into disrepair or been converted to produce flour or snuff. Of particular concern was the shortage of saltpeter—potassium nitrate, typically collected from human and animal dung, and the only scarce ingredient in gunpowder. Identified as a strategic commodity in the medieval Book of Fires for the Burning of Enemies, saltpeter had been imported to Europe from India through Venice for centuries; imperial Britain bought almost two thousand tons a year. The saltpeter was kneaded with small portions of sulfur and charcoal, then pulverized, dusted, glazed, and dried to make gunpowder.

Saltpeter recipes soon appeared in American newspapers and pamphlets for patriots willing to collect the “effluvia of animal bodies” from outhouses, barns, stables, tobacco yards, and pigeon coops, preferably “moistened from time to time with urine.” Massachusetts offered £14 per hundred pounds, triple the price paid by Britain for Indian saltpeter. “I am determined never to have saltpeter out of my mind,” John Adams declared in October. “It must be had.”

Yet it would not be had in sufficient quantities to supply Washington’s magazines, which also lacked bayonets, good muskets, cartridge paper, bullet lead, and even shaped flints. In the next two years, at least 90 percent of American gunpowder, or the saltpeter to make it, would somehow have to come from abroad. For now, the shortage required “a very severe economy,” as one Washington aide wrote, curtailing tactical operations and imposing a quiescent status quo on the siege of Boston. By early fall, virtually all American cannons had fallen silent but for a single 9-pounder on Prospect Hill, fired occasionally in ornery defiance.

As Washington grappled with his powder problems, another shock jolted the American camp. On Tuesday, October 3, nine generals gathered for a war council with the commander in chief in a large front room at Vassall House. Outside the south windows, autumn colors tinted the elm trees, and the distant Charles glistened with a pewter hue. Wasting no time, Washington informed the council that an anonymous, encrypted “letter in characters,” addressed to a British major, had been intercepted in Newport, Rhode Island, and brought to the Cambridge headquarters. The original courier, a woman described by her former husband as “a very lusty woman much pitted with smallpox,” had been apprehended and bundled to Cambridge on the rump of a horse for interrogation.

Washington dramatically placed the pages on a table. An unbroken, nonsensical sequence of letters covered the first sheet for twenty-six lines, then spilled onto a second page. After the letter’s capture, he said, two copies had been sent for decipherment to trusted men with a knack for puzzles. This code substituted a different letter for each letter in the alphabet; it could be solved by identifying the most frequently used symbols in the cipher and assuming they represented the most common letters in English, starting with e, then t, then a, then o, and so forth. Both decryptions had been completed the previous night, and the solutions were identical.

Washington laid one of the translations before his lieutenants. The letter, more than 850 words long, provided details on American strength, artillery in New York, Bunker Hill casualties, troop numbers in Philadelphia, ammunition supplies, and recruiting. “Eighteen thousand brave & determined with Washington and Lee at their head are no contemptible enemy,” the writer had advised. “Remember I never deceived you.… A view to independence grows more and more general.… Make use of every precaution or I perish.”

From clues in the letter and a confession extracted from that lusty, pitted courier the secret author had been identified as Dr. Benjamin Church, recently appointed as the army’s surgeon general. He had been arrested, Washington said, and was confined to a room on the second floor of his hospital headquarters, just down the street from Vassall House. A search of his papers had yielded no incriminating evidence.

The next day, Dr. Church—forty-one, florid, and impeccably tailored—appeared under guard before the war council. He seemed an unlikely turncoat. A Mayflower descendant, Harvard-educated and medically trained in London, a writer of elegy and satire who could quote Virgil in Latin, he was an expert on smallpox inoculation, a physician for the public almshouse, and a radical firebrand who had performed the postmortem examinations of Boston Massacre victims. As a member of the Committee of Safety, he had supported Benedict Arnold’s attack on Ticonderoga and personally escorted Washington into Cambridge three months earlier. True, he had long had a reputation for high living—“much drove for money,” it was said—with a fine house in Boston, a country estate, and various mistresses.

Church quickly admitted authorship, but he insisted the letter was a ruse “to influence the enemy to propose immediate terms of accommodation.” His intent, if foolish and indiscreet, was to gull “the enemy with a strong idea of our strength” in order to forestall a British attack. Little information had been disclosed that Gage’s officers could not read in the newspapers. “I can honestly appeal to heaven for the purity of my intentions,” Church insisted. “I have served faithfully. I have never swerved from my duty through fear or temptation.” After questioning from each general, he was dismissed and marched back to confinement.

Not a man believed him, least of all Washington. “Good God!” John Adams wrote upon hearing the news. “What shall we say of human nature?” The infamous letter, Adams conceded, “is the oddest thing imaginable. There are so many lies in it, calculated to give the enemy a high idea of our power and importance.… Don’t let us abandon him for a traitor without certain evidence.” But what should be done? British statutes dating to the fourteenth century clearly defined treasonous offenses, including “imagining the death of our lord the king,” mounting a rebellion, or seducing the queen. Yet the articles of war recently adopted in Philadelphia failed to address espionage or treason. Uncertain about how best to proceed, Congress sacked Church as surgeon general on October 14 and instructed Massachusetts to decide his fate.

At ten a.m. on Friday, October 27, Church was bundled into a chaise by the county sheriff and escorted by twenty soldiers with fife and drum three miles to the Watertown meetinghouse. Members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, of which Church was an elected delegate, filled many of the hundred boxes on the ground floor. Spectators packed an upstairs gallery, and armed guards stood at each exit. Summoned by the doorkeeper, Church strode down the aisle to a wooden bar below the pulpit. The Speaker, James Warren, read a dispatch from Washington describing the war council’s conclusion that Church was guilty of “holding a criminal correspondence with the enemy.” The infamous letter was produced, and the decryption read.

For more than an hour, Church parried the accusations, invoking the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, and his pure heart. He claimed that he had refused a guinea a day to betray the American cause and that he had merely intended to confuse, if not dupe, the British. The letter was “innocently intended, however indiscreetly executed,” just a “piece of artifice,” ultimately intended for his brother-in-law, a loyalist newspaper publisher. And how, he asked, could he have conducted a criminal correspondence if the letter had not reached the British? General Greene, watching from the gallery, wrote his wife that night, “With art and ingenuity … he veiled the villainy of his conduct and by implication transformed vice into virtue.” Church “appeared spotless as an angel of light,” William Tudor, the judge advocate general, told John Adams.

The assembly broke for a late lunch. After a chicken wing and a mug of flip at Coolidge’s Tavern, Church resumed his defense at three-thirty p.m. “Is it criminal, sir, to alarm them with a parade of our strength and preparation?” he asked. “If this is the work of an enemy, where are we to look for a friend?” Invoking his long service to the cause, he added, “Weigh the labors of an active life against the indiscretion of an hour.… To your wisdom, gentlemen, to your justice, to your tenderness, I cheerfully submit my fate.”

That fate was sealed. The House promptly expelled him for what James Warren called “the wickedness of his heart.” Under orders from Congress, Washington sent him with a nine-man prisoner escort to Connecticut, where Church complained of being confined in a “close, dark, and noisome cell”; Congress specifically denied him “the use of pen, ink, and paper.” Not for more than 150 years, after scholars sifted through General Gage’s private papers, would Church’s guilt be irrefutably confirmed: he had been a British spy at least since early 1775, for cash, and had likely provided information about hidden weapons in Concord, among other rebel secrets.

During Church’s lifetime, he was briefly paroled after several physicians reported that asthmatic conditions in the Connecticut dungeon endangered his health. But angry rioters sacked his Boston house and forced him back to jail for his own protection; efforts to exchange him for American prisoners held by the British provoked more riots. His wife and children made their way to London, where the king gave her a £150 pension. In 1778, Church would finally be allowed to go into exile, but the sloop carrying him to Martinique vanished without a trace. He was never heard from again, although his grieving father, a Boston deacon, refused to give up hope to his own dying day. In 1780, he bequeathed £5 and a shelf of books to his son Benjamin, “whether living or dead, God only knows.”

All through the fall, bored, mischievous, and gullible American soldiers spread fantastic rumors: that the British had been ordered back to England, that a French fleet had put to sea on America’s behalf, that the Spanish had besieged Gibraltar, that eight German generals—or three German princes—would soon arrive with an ammunition ship to help Washington, that Holland had called in debts and forced Britain to declare bankruptcy. It was said on the best authority that a London mob had destroyed the Parliament building and chased Lord North to France.

Autumn sickness crept through the camps, and although the American force exceeded 20,000 by early November, those present and fit for duty remained below 14,000. The officer corps now comprised 60 colonels and lieutenant colonels, 30 majors, 290 captains, 558 lieutenants, and 65 ensigns. Washington’s host also included 21 chaplains, 31 surgeons, 1,238 sergeants, and 690 drummers and fifers. All games of chance, including pitch and hustle, which involved a halfpence coin, were forbidden by his order, so to build morale, wrestling matches were staged in late October between the brigades on Winter and Prospect Hills. Men foraged for chestnuts, apples, and turnips; they sang camp songs accompanied by German flutes. Weather forecasters studied the “upper side of the moon” for clues, though no one doubted that winter was coming. The army would need ten thousand cords of firewood in the next few months, and Washington was already fretting over “a most mortifying scarcity” that hindered recruiting and could force his regiments to disperse or risk freezing.

Every day British fire drubbed the bivouacs, sometimes forty or fifty cannonballs for each American shot. “At about 9 a.m. we flung two 18-lb. balls into Boston from the lower fort, just to let them know where to find us, for which the enemy returned 90 shots,” a soldier told his diary in October. A comrade wrote of the same incident, “One man had his arm shot off there and two cows killed. Nothing new.” Local newspapers carried dozens of reward offers for deserters, including “one Jonathan Hantley, a well-set fellow, about five feet nine inches in height … talks with a brogue, pretends to doctor, professes to have great skill in curing cancers”; and Simeon Smith, “about 5 feet 4 inches high, had on a blue coat and black vest … his voice in the hermaphrodite fashion”; and “Matthias Smith, a small smart fellow, is apt to say, ‘I swear, I swear!’ and between his words will spit smart.”

For more than twenty years Washington had doubted that amateur citizen soldiers could form what he called “a respectable army,” capable of defeating trained, disciplined professionals. Nothing he had seen in Cambridge changed his mind. Militiamen called to arms for a few weeks or months “will never answer your expectations,” he had once written. “No dependence is to be placed upon them. They are obstinate and perverse.” With most enlistments due to expire in December and January, Washington told Hancock on October 30 that perhaps half of all the junior officers were likely to leave the army and “I fear will communicate the infection” to the enlisted ranks. “I confess,” he added, “I have great anxieties upon the subject.”

All the more reason to strike the British before winter arrived and his army drifted away. Yet his wish for “a speedy finish of the dispute” found little support among his generals. A proposed amphibious assault on Boston, supported by artillery and a frontal attack at the Neck, was unanimously rejected by his war council for fear that Boston would share Charlestown’s charred fate. Washington suggested another plan and it, too, was rejected, to a man, on October 18. “Too great a risk,” General Lee advised. “Not practicable under all circumstances,” General Greene added.

He had little recourse but to husband his gunpowder, stockpile firewood, and launch an occasional raid or sniping sortie with the ten companies of riflemen Congress had sent from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Unlike muskets, rifle barrels were grooved to spin bullets for greater stability and accuracy. A capable marksman might hit a bull’s-eye at two hundred yards, although the weapon was slower to load; the projectile had to be wrapped in a greased linen patch and painstakingly “wanged” down the tighter bore. Moreover, no bayonet had yet been invented that would fit over a rifle muzzle. Riflemen were lethal and exotic, happily demonstrating their sharpshooting prowess while firing from their backs, or while running, or with trusting comrades holding targets between their knees. Many wore fringed hunting shirts, moccasins, and even Indian paint. Throngs of admiring civilians turned out to cheer them as the long-striding companies made their way toward Cambridge. They also proved maddening to their commanders, their boorish or insubordinate behavior sometimes leading to arrests and shackles. “Washington has said he wished they had never come,” General Ward told John Adams on October 30. Lee called them “damned riff-raff—dirty, mutinous, and disaffected.” Still, a Washington aide reported that rifle fire so unnerved the British “that nothing is to be seen over the breastwork but a hat.” A Yankee newspaper warned, “General Gage, take care of your nose.”

But General Gage had gone, and he took his nose with him. In late September, Scarborough arrived in Boston with orders summoning Gage home, a decision made soon after the news of Bunker Hill reached London. The king had insisted that the general’s feelings be spared by pretending that he was being recalled to plan the 1776 campaign. Gage packed his personal papers in white pine boxes and, after a flurry of salutes, sailed aboard the transport Pallas at nine p.m. on October 11. He was soon forgotten, both in America and in England, though he continued to draw a salary as the Crown’s governor of Massachusetts. Horace Walpole joked that he might be hanged for the errors of his masters.

William Howe moved into Province House as the new “general and commander-in-chief of all His Majesty’s forces within the colonies laying on the Atlantic Ocean from Nova Scotia to West Florida inclusive, etc., etc., etc.” Major General Howe’s sentiments on the occasion could not be discerned, for he remained relentlessly taciturn—“never wastes a monosyllable,” Walpole quipped—the better to hide his indecision. Now forty-six and thickset, with bulging eyes and a heavy brow, he bore an uncanny resemblance to his monarch, perhaps because his mother was widely rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of George I. His father, a viscount and the governor of Barbados, had died young in 1735. William Howe’s eldest brother, George, deemed “the best officer in the British Army,” had also died young, from a French bullet at Fort Carillon in 1758; in gratitude, Massachusetts paid £250 for a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. A second brother, Richard, succeeded to the viscount’s title and was now an admiral. William emerged belaureled from the French war, not least for his celebrated climb up a St. Lawrence River bluff to reach the Plains of Abraham—“laying hold of stumps and boughs of trees,” a witness reported—during Britain’s capture of Quebec. Family lore held that he returned to England clad in buckskin and moccasins, to be known thereafter to his siblings as “the Savage.”

Elected to Parliament from Nottingham, the Savage advocated restraint in colonial policy and vowed never to take up arms against his American kinsmen—even as he privately advised Lords North and Dartmouth that he was willing to do precisely that. When orders came to report to Boston, he told a constituent that he “could not refuse without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serving my country in a day of distress.” He added assurances that “the insurgents are very few in comparison to the whole of the people.” Although he rarely spoke, was often wrong when he did, and seemed averse to advice, the manly if morose Howe was a welcome change within the ranks after Old Woman Gage. “He is much beloved by the whole army,” a captain wrote. “They feel a confidence in him.”

Howe now had some eleven thousand mouths to feed, and little to feed them. “What in God’s name are ye all about in England?” an officer wrote in a letter published at home. “Have you forgot us?” Hospitals remained jammed with men suffering from wounds, scurvy, dysentery, and other maladies. “I have eat fresh meat but three times in six weeks,” a lieutenant wrote. Rebel whaleboats chased loyalist fishing smacks from coastal waters, severing supplies of cod, haddock, and terrapin. Bad mutton cost a shilling a pound; a skinny goose, twenty shillings. Salt meat was the inevitable staple, though said to be “as hard as wood, as lean as carrion, and as rusty as the devil.” General Percy reportedly killed and roasted a foal for his table, while one Winifried McCowen, a camp retainer, took a hundred lashes across her back for stealing and butchering the town bull. A Boston man wrote that he had been “invited by two gentlemen to dine upon rats.”

With each passing day, the blockade grew more oppressive. “They are burrowing like rabbits all around us,” wrote Captain Glanville Evelyn, now commanding a light infantry company encamped in leaky tents on Bunker Hill. “There’s nothing reconciles being shot at … so much as being paid for it.” General Burgoyne was in high dudgeon. “Our present situation is a consummation of inertness and disgrace,” he wrote. “Driven from one hill, you will see the enemy continually retrenched upon the next.… Could we at last penetrate ten miles, perhaps we should not attain a single sheep or an ounce of flour, for they remove every article of provisions as they go.” By Howe’s calculations, to move 32 regiments beyond Boston would require 3,662 horses—plus nearly 50 tons of hay and oats daily to feed them—and 540 wagons. That was almost 3,000 horses and 500 wagons more than he had.

Shifting the army by sea from Boston to New York had been discussed since midsummer. Burgoyne listed eight good reasons to make the move, including the large trove of loyalists there, access to food and forage on Long Island, and control of the Hudson valley corridor to Canada. But permission from London had been late in arriving, as usual, and now the season was too far advanced for a safe passage, given stormy weather, rebel pirates, and the lack of a single secure harbor between Boston and New York. Howe did some more arithmetic: unless five thousand regulars were left to hold Boston, complementing the twelve thousand needed in New York, at least a thousand Crown officials and loyalists would also have to be transported, along with £300,000 in goods, which, Burgoyne urged, “ought on no account to be left to the enemy.” Such an exodus would require far more British shipping than was currently available. Inevitably they would have to winter in Boston, as one private wrote, “like birds in a cage.”

Badly fed birds, at that. “Starve them out” had been a Yankee rallying cry since April. Britain had never maintained a large army several thousand miles from home without buying local food and fodder; living off the land by plunder was generally impossible for armies in the eighteenth century, even when the land was accessible. To sustain the fleet, in the coming months the Navy and Victualling Boards would hire far more transport tonnage than in the last French war, and that did not include ships needed by the Treasury and Ordnance Board bureaucracies responsible for feeding army troops abroad. As Cardinal Richelieu, the great French statesman during the Thirty Years’ War, had warned, “History knows many more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies.”

British supply contractors were supposed to stockpile at least a six-month food reserve in Boston, yet when Howe took command, the larder held less than a thirty-day supply, including just two dozen bushels of peas. Five storeships from England and Ireland arrived, but most of the 5,200 barrels of flour aboard proved rancid. Regulars composed an impious parody: “Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our not eating it.”

Strongboxes stuffed with cash were shipped from London to Boston aboard Centurion, Greyhound, and other warships; by late fall, more than £300,000 had been requisitioned. But rebels often thwarted British efforts to buy supplies in New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere. Moreover, transaction fees had risen to a staggering 23 percent of the sums spent. Shortages of fodder required slaughtering milk cows in Boston for meat; more than three dozen vessels sailed to Quebec and the Bay of Fundy in search of hay and oats, an unfortunate, if necessary, use of precious shipping. In mid-November, Howe sent London another set of beautiful charts, with exquisite clerical calligraphy and precise double lines drawn in red pencil to separate the columns, all to demonstrate that “there are not provisions for the army in store to serve longer than the beginning of March 1776.” Lieutenant William Feilding of the British marines wrote home, “Nothing but a desire of scouring the insolent rebels of our country keeps up the soldiers’ spirit.”

Alcohol helped, too. American rum was deemed “new and unwholesome,” so in September the British government signed an initial contract for 100,000 gallons of West Indies rum to be delivered to the army, complementing 375,000 gallons of porter to help combat scurvy. By spring a half million gallons of rum would be purchased for the Boston garrison at three to five shillings a gallon, the largest single item of expense among government provisions; ten times more was spent on rum than on medicines. The Treasury Board also saw to it that British officials in America received hydrometers—each composed of a glass cylinder, a thermometer, and various weights carefully marked for Jamaica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and other sources of West Indies rum—along with three pages of instructions on how to test each lot to ensure that contractors delivered “the usual and proper proof.” Rum had long been a reward for difficult military duty; Howe quietly made it part of the regular ration, issued at a daily rate of a quart for every six men.

Four small British warships and a storeship rounded the Casco Bay headland off Falmouth, Maine, on the mild, breezy morning of Monday, October 16. Nearly two thousand souls lived in remote Falmouth, a hundred miles upcoast from Boston, the men scratching out a living as fishermen, millers, and timberjacks. For more than half a century, Royal Navy agents had routinely come to collect enormous white pines, some of them three feet in diameter and blazed with the king’s proprietary broad-arrow insignia. After felling, the great sticks were twitched into the water by twenty yokes of oxen, then lashed into rafts or winched onto ships and hauled across the Atlantic to Portsmouth and other shipyards to be shaped and stepped as the towering masts on the king’s biggest men-of-war. To the lament of British shipwrights, that mast trade all but ended with the gunplay at Lexington. Felled timber had been hidden upriver from Falmouth, and after armed rebels twice thwarted British efforts to secure the masts, Royal Navy officers threatened “to beat the town down about their ears.”

As the five vessels carefully warped into the harbor the following afternoon, a rumor spread that the intruders simply intended to rustle livestock along the bay. Militiamen hurried off to shoo the flocks and herds to safety. That delusion vanished at four p.m., when a British naval officer with a marine escort rowed to the King Street dock, marched to the crowded town hall in Greele’s Lane, and with a flourish delivered a written ultimatum, “full of bad English and worse spelling,” one witness complained. Read aloud twice by a local lawyer who was said to have “a tremor in his voice,” the decree warned that in the name of “the best of sovereigns … you have been guilty of the most unpardonable rebellion.” The flotilla had orders to administer “a just punishment”: Falmouth was given two hours to evacuate “the human species out of the said town.” “Every heart,” a clergyman wrote, “was seized with terror, every countenance changed color, and a profound silence ensued.” A three-man delegation rowed out to Canceaux, an eight-gun former merchantman, to beg mercy of Lieutenant Henry Mowat, the flotilla commander.

Few sailors knew the upper New England coast better than Mowat, a forty-one-year-old Scot who for more than a decade had surveyed every cove, island, and inlet for Admiralty charts. One senior officer described him as “the most useful person perhaps in America for the service we are engaged in.” Mowat held a grudge against Maine militiamen, who had briefly taken him prisoner during a skirmish over the contested masts in Falmouth five months earlier. But his instructions from Admiral Graves went far beyond personal revenge: Graves had been ordered by Lord Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, to “show the rebels the weight of an English fleet.… You may be blamed for doing little but can never be censured for doing too much.” Graves had taken the hint. In early October, he’d told Mowat to “burn, destroy, and lay waste” nine maritime towns northeast of Boston.

So far the chastisement had gone badly. Gales nearly wrecked two of Mowat’s ships off Gloucester. Houses in a couple of targeted towns were judged by his gunnery experts to be too scattered to be worth his limited supply of incendiary carcasses. Contrary winds kept the flotilla from reaching Machias, another town two hundred miles up the coast, where a British midshipman and several sailors had been killed in a bloody scrap in June. Falmouth would have to do.

The town “had not the least right to expect any lenity,” Mowat told the emissaries. His orders were unequivocal. But because of “the known humanity of the British nation,” he would hold his fire if by eight a.m. all small arms, ammunition, and the five carriage guns known to be in Falmouth were surrendered.

All night long the townsfolk debated, fretted, wailed, and debated some more. Horse and ox teams plodded through Queen, Fish, and Middle Streets, hauling away furniture, shop goods, and the infirm. Hothead militiamen vowed to incinerate the town themselves if Falmouth complied with Mowat’s demand. A few old muskets were sculled out to the Canceaux to buy time, but at dawn the people of Falmouth screwed up their courage and sent another delegation to inform Mowat that they had “resolved by no means to deliver up the cannon and other arms.” “Perceiving women and children still in the town,” Mowat later told Graves, “I made it forty minutes after nine before the signal was hoisted.”

A red flag appeared on Canceaux’s main topgallant masthead. Tongues of smoke and flame abruptly licked from the ships’ gun decks. “The firing began from all the vessels,” a witness later wrote, “a horrible shower of balls from three to nine pounds weight, bombs, carcasses, live shells, grapeshot, and musketballs”—eventually more than three thousand projectiles. The crash of shattered glass and splintered wood echoed along the waterfront, where a dozen merchant coasters also came under bombardment. For three hours fires blazed up only to be swatted out by homeowners and shopkeepers, although some militiamen looted their neighbors while pretending to fight fires. “The oxen, terrified at the smoke and report of the guns, ran with precipitation over the rocks, dashing everything to pieces,” another resident wrote.

“At noon,” Canceaux’s log recorded, “the fire began to be general both in the town and vessels, but being calm the fire did not spread as wished for.” Concussion and recoil also fractured several gun carriages on the British ships—the sloop Spitfire was “much shattered,” Mowat reported—so thirty marines and sailors went ashore to toss torches through windows and doorways. The breeze picked up at two p.m., and by late afternoon Falmouth “presented a broad sheet of flame” from Parsons Lane to Fore Street.

Britain had murdered another Yankee town. The Essex Gazette tallied 416 buildings destroyed, including 136 houses, the Episcopal church, various barns, the meetinghouse, the customs house, the library, and the new courthouse. Many of the hundred structures still standing were thoroughly ventilated by balls and shells, and the three-day rain that began at ten p.m. ruined furnishings that had failed to burn. Mowat counted eleven American vessels sunk or burned, four others captured, and a distillery, wharves, and warehouses “all laid into ashes.” With his ammunition nearly spent and the flotilla badly in need of repairs, he anchored overnight in ten fathoms, then sailed for Boston. The remaining eight towns on Admiral Graves’s chastisement list would be spared.

The admiral claimed to have administered “a severe stroke to the rebels,” but he soon took a stroke himself when a letter from London arrived relieving him of command. Graves had done both too little and too much in six months of war; the Admiralty had grown weary of his excuses and the army’s complaints. He would be missed by no one except perhaps his nephews. As an act of vengeance, the razing of Falmouth may have brought brief satisfaction, but it made little sense tactically or strategically. While nearly two thousand residents sought shelter at the beginning of a Maine winter, couriers carried the news to the outside world. “It cannot be true,” the Gentleman’s Magazine opined when reports reached London. The French foreign minister called the attack “absurd as well as barbaric.” In Cambridge, General Lee denounced “the tragedy acted by these hell hounds of an execrable ministry” and recommended seizing British hostages in New York. “This is savage and barbarous,” James Warren wrote John Adams. “What more can we want to justify any step to take, kill, and destroy?”

The wolf had risen in the heart. Enraged and unified, Americans demanded revenge. Coastal towns fortified themselves and organized early warning systems with beacons and express riders. The Yale College library became an armory. Some colonial governments had already authorized privateers—merchantmen converted into warships—to attack enemy shipping, and Congress would soon follow suit. Such patriot marauders collected from a third to the entire value of a captured ship, with severe consequences in the coming years for several thousand British vessels.

Few were angrier than General Washington. He rejected Falmouth’s plea for ammunition and men—the commander in chief could hardly disperse his modest army among coastal enclaves—but in a pale fury he denounced British “cruelty and barbarity.” More clearly than ever he saw the war as a moral crusade, a death struggle between good and evil. In general orders to the troops he fulminated against “a brutal, savage enemy.” Many Americans now agreed with the sentiment published in the New-England Chronicle a month after Falmouth’s immolation: “We expect soon to break off all kinds of connections with Britain, and form into a grand republic of the American colonies.”