Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

  In front of them was Charlestown, tucked into the side of the hill and the harbor. To the east was the sweep of an easy slope that ran down to a thirty-five-foot shoreside bump known as Morton’s Hill. There were some fences, some swampy ground, and the clay pits of a brick kiln, but nothing of any substance to prevent an army of regulars from landing at the tip of the peninsula and attacking from their unprotected left. Here they were—all by themselves, already exhausted and sleep-deprived, with no one to support them.

  Just as this terrifying realization began to settle in, they saw a bud of flame erupt from the side of one of those nearby warships, followed by a soul-shattering roar and the hissing smack of a cannonball as it buried itself in the dirt. It was the sloop-of-war Lively, and soon enough, another cannonball was flying through the air in their direction. It was mesmerizing, the way you could see the black dot arc lazily through the cloudless sky, all the while knowing that it was going to land somewhere near where you were standing. The officers assured the men that while the cannons made plenty of noise, they were, in actuality, surprisingly ineffective when it came to killing soldiers. It was time to get back to work and finish the fort.

  On the third, perhaps the fourth, shot one of those black dots proved the officers wrong. Thirty-five-year-old Asa Pollard of Billerica was working in front of the redoubt when a four-inch-diameter cannonball weighing nine pounds divided his head from the rest of his body. This was more than many of these young recruits could stand. They asked Colonel Prescott what they should do with their friend’s headless corpse. A minister offered to say a few words before Pollard was committed into the ground, but Prescott insisted that he be buried immediately and that they continue to work on the fort. The minister seems to have succeeded in conducting an impromptu service, but it was Prescott who soon had his men’s attention.

  He leaped onto the parapet of the redoubt, and as cannonballs continued to sizzle through the air, he urged the men on. He had a three-cornered hat on his head, and “strutting backward and forward” with a long evening coat (known as a banyan) swirling about him like a colorful cape, he pulled the hat off his head and, waving it in the air, shouted at the British warships below them, “Hit me if you can.” It was a most inspiring display of courage, and yet what one veteran later remembered was how all the hat-waving had somehow displaced Prescott’s pigtail so that “it hung over his right shoulder, giving him a quite ludicrous appearance.”

  Prescott had fought with such distinction during the French and Indian War that he had been offered a commission in the British army—an offer he was quite happy to refuse. An anger smoldered inside Prescott, who appears to have had no patience with Israel Putnam’s nostalgic fondness for the British officers with whom he had fought in Canada. A few months earlier, his brother-in-law Abijah Willard, a loyalist, had warned him “that his life and estate would be forfeited for treason” if he took up arms against Britain. “I have made up my mind on that subject,” Prescott replied, “I think it probable I may be found in arms, but I will never be taken alive.”

  Prescott could see that they were dreadfully open to attack on the left. They needed to build an earthen wall that ran more than 150 feet to the east, where it would connect with a virtually impassable swamp. If men were posted behind that wall, the British would have a much harder time surrounding them.

  By this point, Gridley, the engineer, had, in Prescott’s words, “forsook me.” A brief lull in the firing from the Lively gave Prescott the chance to draw out the dimensions of the wall in the dirt, and soon his men were at it once again—digging a deep ditch and piling up the dirt into what came to be known as “the breastwork.”

  But as the cannon fire resumed and the sun climbed in the sky and exhaustion and thirst began to erode what little enthusiasm Prescott had been able to muster, the men started to wonder once again about what they’d gotten themselves into. In addition to artillery fire from the Lively and the other men-of-war, the battery on Copp’s Hill, less than a mile away and with cannons that fired balls that, at twenty-five pounds, were more than twice as heavy as those from the Lively, now had its big guns trained on Prescott’s redoubt. “Some of our country people [started to] desert,” Peter Brown wrote, “apprehending the danger in a clearer manner than the rest, who were more diligent in digging and fortifying ourselves against the [enemy]. We began to be almost beat out, being tired by our labor and having no sleep the night before, but little victuals, no drink but rum.”

  Some of Prescott’s officers insisted that it was time to request reinforcements. After building the fort, these men could not be expected to defend it. They must send a messenger to General Ward in Cambridge. But Prescott was adamant. They were the ones who had built these walls, “and they should have the honor of defending them.” No reinforcements were necessary.

  There may have been more than a little defensiveness in Prescott’s refusal to seek aid. If they had been where they were supposed to be—on Bunker Hill—there would have been no need for reinforcements. They would have been beyond the effective range of the British battery. They would have also been much closer to the relative safety of Cambridge. There would have been none of this drama and angst—just a lot of digging. That was why General Ward had made no apparent preparations for a possible battle on June 17. But Prescott had changed everything. Whether it was a result of, as Private Peter Brown wrote, “treachery, oversight, or presumption,” Prescott had stirred up a hornet’s nest by building this lonely redoubt, and he was reluctant to admit that he now needed help.

  Finally it was decided; they must seek assistance. But there was a problem. No one had a horse. And so, just after 9:00 a.m., Major John Brooks, a twenty-three-year-old doctor from Medford, began the three-and-a-half-mile walk to Cambridge.

  —

  By that time the British had a plan. Soon after daybreak, Gage had conducted a meeting with Clinton, Howe, and Burgoyne in Province House to discuss the best way to deal with the new patriot fort. Clinton was for mounting a two-pronged attack. While Howe led a frontal assault against the redoubt, he would venture up the Mystic River by boat with five hundred regulars, and after landing at Charlestown Neck, attack from the rear. If Gage had agreed to this plan, Clinton would have, a fellow officer later claimed, “shut them up in the peninsula as in a bag. . . . They must have surrendered instantly or been blown to pieces.” But as Gage pointed out, this would have placed Clinton in an exceedingly risky position. All it would take was a provincial assault from Cambridge to trap him and his small force between two armies.

  Howe had what Gage considered to be a far less risky plan. As they could all plainly see, the redoubt was almost totally exposed to an assault from the American left. By capitalizing on this glaring vulnerability, Howe proposed to envelop the redoubt and attack it from several sides simultaneously. With the exception of Clinton (who lamented that “my advice was not attended to”), the other officers agreed that Howe’s plan was a sound one.

  Before it could be put in place, the regulars had to be assembled at Long Wharf and the North Battery for transportation across the harbor to Morton’s Point on the eastern tip of the peninsula. With high tide scheduled for around three in the afternoon, they would aim to coordinate the assault with the tide.

  At some point that morning, Howe met with Admiral Graves. It was essential that the ships’ cannons provide the troops with an effective covering fire; they also wanted to be sure to pound the redoubt as unmercifully as possible, even as they did everything in their power to prevent provincial reinforcements from crossing the Neck onto the Charlestown peninsula. Graves’s largest vessels, the Boyne and Somerset, could not elevate their guns high enough to fire on the heights of Breed’s Hill, and they were too big to approach Charlestown Neck. This left the Lively, whose guns had begun the fighting, the Glasgow, the Symmetry, and the much smaller Falcon and Spitfire, which were all positioned around the southern and western sides of the peninsula.
The causeway of a milldam provided a barrier to the vessels approaching the Neck from the Charles River, but with the aid of two raftlike gondolas, each equipped with a twelve-pound cannon, they should be able to make the Neck a very hot place for any provincial reinforcements.

  Gage would spend most of the day in Province House, but that morning he ventured out to inspect the American fort for himself. With the help of his spyglass he could see a man standing on the parapet of the redoubt, about a thousand yards away as the cannonball flies. Beside Gage was the loyalist Abijah Willard. Handing Willard his telescope, Gage asked if could recognize the man standing so promiscuously on the fort. The distance was probably too great to see his face, but the banyan may have tipped Willard off. By God, it was his brother-in-law, William Prescott.

  “Will he fight?” Gage asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Willard replied. “He is an old soldier and will fight as long as a drop of blood remains in his veins.”

  —

  Around 10:00 a.m. Major John Brooks arrived in Cambridge after the long walk from Charlestown. He immediately reported to General Ward at Hastings House. The ever-cautious commander in chief found himself in an impossible position. Prescott had disobeyed orders and built a fort within easy cannon shot of the British, and now he needed reinforcements in anticipation of a British attack. But who was to say the British were not going to stay with their original plan and move on Dorchester and Roxbury on the other side of Boston? And then there was the possibility of an amphibious assault not on Charlestown but on Cambridge. He must wait to see what the British were up to before he could send a sizable force to support Prescott.

  But no matter what the British did, the Americans had to face a most distressing reality. The army had very little gunpowder. The Committee of Safety was then in session at Hastings House, and they sent out a desperate plea to David Cheever on the Committee of Supplies. Although they had just received thirty-six half barrels of powder from Connecticut, there were only twenty-seven half barrels in the provincial magazine. There was apparently no more powder available from the towns. And as John Brooks had recently discovered, horses were also very difficult to come by. The Committee of Safety (the entity that functioned as the province’s executive body) was without the express riders required to communicate effectively with its own army, which was scattered across a ten-mile perimeter around Boston.

  Making matters even worse, the committee’s chairman, Dr. Joseph Warren, was nowhere to be found. The night before, Warren had frightened many of his colleagues with wild words about joining Prescott and his men on Bunker Hill. But that was before one of the headaches he had been known to suffer required him to retire to a darkened room and await the passing of the incapacitating pain. Warren had done a heroic job of holding the province together over the last two months, but even he, apparently, had his limits. Delegating responsibility had never been his forte, and with Warren out of commission, no one seemed willing to act.

  Finally, Committee of Safety member Richard Devens made a decision. They must reinforce Prescott. With Ward’s reluctant approval, they would send all, not just some, of the New Hampshire regiments led by James Reed and John Stark to the Charlestown peninsula. Reed’s men were housed near Charlestown Neck and Stark’s were in Medford, and with luck they would reach Prescott by the middle of the afternoon.

  —

  One of the few provincials with a horse was General Israel Putnam. Already, he had ridden at least twice from Bunker Hill to Cambridge and back. Having participated in the discussion the night before about where to build the redoubt, he was now obsessed with the need to build a fortification on Bunker Hill. Otherwise Prescott’s men would have nowhere to fall back to in the event of a British attack. What Putnam did not have, however, were entrenching tools.

  By about noon, it seemed as if Prescott had finally finished his redoubt and breastwork. Putnam decided it was time that he and some of Prescott’s men carry the tools up to Bunker Hill. But Prescott would have none of it. Already, he had lost a significant number of men to desertion. The British cannon fire had been unremitting. In fact, one of his most trusted officers, Captain Ebenezer Bancroft, a fellow French and Indian War veteran, had been blinded in one eye by the shock wave of a cannonball that had narrowly missed his head. Prescott told Putnam that “if he sent any of the men away with the tools, not one of them would return.” Putnam assured him that “every man [shall] return” and left with the tools and a considerable number of soldiers, none of whom, it turned out, ever made their way back to Breed’s Hill.

  —

  Not long after Putnam’s departure, an artillery captain belatedly arrived at the redoubt with several fieldpieces. Unfortunately, Colonel Gridley had made no provision for cannons in the redoubt. Normal procedure was to build embrasures—openings for cannons in the fort’s earthen walls—but that had apparently escaped Gridley’s attention during the tense discussions the night before. Making it even worse, they were now without any digging tools.

  Prescott ordered Captain Bancroft and his men to dig an embrasure by hand. They went at it with a will, but soon realized that their bleeding fingers were not up to the task. But Bancroft had an idea. He ordered the artillery captain to load his fieldpiece and blast a hole through the wall of the redoubt, and soon enough a cannon could be seen protruding from the redoubt on Breed’s Hill.

  —

  By 1:30 p.m., the first wave of British boats had been loaded with regulars at Long Wharf and the North Battery and had begun to row across the harbor toward the Charlestown peninsula. Generals Clinton and Burgoyne had positioned themselves at the battery on Copp’s Hill. They were not the only spectators that day. All around them, on the top of every hill, roof, and steeple, the inhabitants of Boston looked to the north.

  They were a community in the sky, their eyes trained across a quiet and, except for the warships, empty harbor in the boiling sun, looking toward a hilly peninsula and an unoccupied town that was almost the mirror image of their own. Cannons boomed from the battery and the surrounding ships, and now they could see the boats, twenty-eight of them, rowing across in two parallel lines of fourteen each, with brass fieldpieces in the forwardmost boats and between thirty and forty regulars in each one of the others, their musket barrels glittering in the sun.

  The fighting at Lexington and Concord had been fierce, but one could claim, as Timothy Pickering Jr. had done, that April 19 amounted to nothing more than yet another misunderstanding between Britain and her American colonies that had gotten out of hand. The fighting at Lexington and Concord had occurred, by and large, offstage, only visible to the Bostonians as a distant cloud of dust and powder smoke moving across the countryside to Charlestown. But the fighting today was going to be different. Already the big guns of the warships and the battery on Copp’s Hill had been filling the air with sound and smoke, but that was just a prelude. Much more than a skirmish, this was going to be a true battle, unfolding with a painstaking deliberation before their very eyes as Howe’s red-clad army rowed slowly across the blue and sparkling harbor toward a green hill where the provincials were, the Reverend Andrew Eliot wrote, “up to their chins entrenched.”

  Colonel Jones of the Fifty-Second Regiment appears to have been standing with Clinton and Burgoyne on Copp’s Hill. “I have seen many actions,” he wrote, “but the solemn procession preparative to this, in embarking the troops in the boats, the order in which they rowed across the harbor, their alertness in making good their landing, their instantly forming in front of the enemy and marching to action, was a grand sight to all concerned.”

  Hovering over the awful beauty of the scene was a most disturbing question. What if Howe and his regulars were defeated? The question would have seemed laughable just a few months before, but after the humiliation of April 19 and the equally embarrassing loss of the Diana at the mouth of Chelsea Creek, the shade of a doubt had entered the minds of more than a few British offic
ers. Despite his bold talk about “elbowroom” back in May, Burgoyne could not help but speculate that a loss today might mean “a final loss to the British Empire in America.”

  Somehow it had come to this: a battle that could very well determine the fate of the English-speaking world. And here they now were, on rooftops and on hills—a city of loyalists, patriots, soldiers, and refugees—awaiting the outcome.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Battle

  Captain John Chester of Wethersfield, Connecticut, had just finished his midday dinner in Cambridge. It was about 1:00 p.m. “I was walking out from my lodgings,” he remembered, “quite calm and composed and all at once the drums beat to arms and bells rang and a great noise in Cambridge.” Suddenly Putnam’s son Israel Jr. rode up “in a full gallop.” Chester asked, “What is the matter?” “Have you not heard?” Putnam cried. “Why the regulars are landing in Charlestown, and father says you must all meet and march immediately to Bunker Hill.”

  Amid the shouts and ringing bells and beating drums, Chester ran back to his quarters and retrieved his musket and ammunition. Then it was on to the Anglican church that served as a barracks for his men, who were “mainly ready to march.” But they had a problem. Unlike virtually all the other provincial soldiers, Chester’s company from Wethersfield had uniforms; in fact, they looked so good in their red-trimmed blue coats that a week before they’d been given the honor of accompanying Warren and Putnam on a prisoner exchange that had involved several convivial hours with a group of equally well-dressed British officers and their men. But now the uniforms were a liability. Wearing a bright blue coat amid an army of slovenly farmers was tantamount to having a target on your back. So before they headed for Bunker Hill, they put “our frocks and trousers on over our other clothes . . . for we were loath to expose ourselves.”