Part III
THE SIEGE
In sieges, as in all undertakings, it is necessary [and] timely to consider every . . . circumstance that may happen during the execution of the design, and to provide in the best manner against every seeming obstacle. Not only the general’s character, the reputation of the army, and the glory of his country are concerned, but a prodigious expense must unavoidably attend such an enterprise, all [of] which are entirely lost in case of a miscarriage, besides the lives of a number of men, a more sensible loss to the nation.
—John Muller, The Attack and Defense of Fortified Places, 1757
It is a military maxim that “fortune may fail us, but a prudent conduct never will.” At the same time, some of the most brilliant victories have been obtained by a daring stroke.
—William Heath, 1798
The history of this war down to the present day . . . will be little else than a detail of marvelous interpositions of providence.
—the Reverend William Gordon, April 1, 1776
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Fiercest Man
Even before the end of the battle, boats filled with British casualties began arriving at the wharves of Boston. All that night and well into Sunday morning the town’s streets were crowded with “coaches, chariots, single-horse chaises, and even handbarrows” full of bleeding soldiers. “To see the carts loaded with those unfortunate men,” the loyalist Peter Oliver wrote, “and to hear the piercing groans of the dying . . . extorted the sigh from the firmest mind.”
At one point Oliver saw an officer he knew “advancing towards me, his white waistcoat, breeches and stockings being very much dyed of a scarlet hue.” Oliver called out, “My friend, are you wounded?” “Yes, sir!” he replied. “I have three bullets through me.” “He then told me the places where,” Oliver remembered, “one of them being a mortal wound. He then with a philosophical calmness began to relate the history of the battle, and in all probability would have talked till he died, had I not begged him to walk off to the hospital, which he did in as sedate a manner as if he had been walking for his pleasure.”
Typically, the church bells tolled during a funeral. So many soldiers were dying from their wounds in the days following the battle—the army had suffered casualties approaching fifty percent—that Gage ordered that the bells be stilled. Otherwise they would be tolling all day. But it wasn’t just wounded soldiers who were dying. Many of the city’s inhabitants, especially the poor and elderly, had been weakened by months without fresh meat and vegetables and were beginning to die in startling numbers. The Bostonian Rufus Greene had a relative with the inauspicious name of Coffin. When Coffin died in early July, Greene was one of his pallbearers, and no bells rang. “It seemed strange,” he wrote.
“Death has so long stalked among us,” Jonathan Sewall wrote, “that he is become much less terrible to me than he once was. . . . Funerals are now so frequent that for a month past you meet as many dead folks as live ones in Boston streets, and we pass them with much less emotion and attention than we used to pass dead sheep and oxen in days of yore when such sights were to be seen in our streets.”
Within a week of the battle, General Gage had reluctantly decided, at the prodding of Henry Clinton, that he must proceed with the original plan and take Dorchester Heights. Now that Howe had possession of Bunker Hill, it only made sense to assume control of this last remaining piece of strategically placed high ground, especially since the provincials clearly lacked the gunpowder and artillery needed to defend it. But after going through the motions of putting together a detachment of two thousand regulars for the assault, Gage, fearful that the provincial force in Roxbury was larger than it actually was, abandoned the operation.
In the weeks to come, Howe’s troops on Bunker Hill constructed an elaborate, virtually impenetrable fort atop the peninsula that had cost the British so many lives to obtain. But Dorchester Heights, even though it overlooked both the Castle and Boston’s South End, remained empty and neglected: a kind of monument to the deathblow that the Battle of Bunker Hill had dealt to the ambitions of Thomas Gage.
He had arrived in Boston with hopes of snuffing out an insurrection. He now knew that Britain was in for a protracted war—a war against her own subjects for which it was difficult for a British soldier to have much enthusiasm. “We shall soon be driven from the ruins of our victory . . . ,” an officer predicted. “Our three generals [Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne] came over in high spirits and expected rather to punish a mob than fight with troops that would look them in the face; there is an air of dejection through all our superiors which forebodes no good, and does not look as things ought to after a victory.” Before Lieutenant Colonel James Abercrombie died of the wounds he received on Breed’s Hill, he delivered a deathbed speech of sorts. “My friends,” he was reputed to have said, “we have fought in a bad cause, and therefore I have my reward.”
On the Sunday after the fighting, Margaret Gage went walking with a female friend. As they stood gazing across Boston Harbor at the smoky remnants of Charlestown, Margaret recited some lines from Shakespeare’s King John:
The sun’s o’ercast with blood; fair day, adieu!
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both; each army hath a hand,
And in their rage—I having hold of both—
They whirl asunder, and dismember me.
A few days later, her husband penned a letter to secretary of war Lord Barrington. “The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear . . . ,” he wrote. “I wish this cursed place was burned.”
—
Joseph Warren’s twenty-two-year-old brother John was in Salem on June 17 when around sunset “a very great fire was discovered” in the direction of Boston. He soon learned that a battle had been fought in Charlestown and that his brother had been in it. After just a few hours of sleep, he left Salem around two in the morning. By sunrise he was in Medford, where he “received the melancholy and distressing tidings that my brother was missing.” He rushed to Cambridge, where each person he talked to seemed to have a different story. Some said his brother was alive and well; others said that he’d been killed. “This perplexed me almost to distraction,” he wrote. “I went on inquiring, with a solicitude which was such a mixture of hope and fear as none but one who has felt it can form any conception of. In this manner I passed several days, every day’s information diminishing the probability of his safety.”
He knew that the only ones who could provide definitive word were the enemy, so he went to the British line at Charlestown Neck and requested to speak with someone who knew what had happened to his brother. When the sentry refused to help, Warren desperately tried to push his way past until the sentry stabbed him with a bayonet. Bleeding from a wound that would eventually harden into a jagged scar, John Warren returned to Cambridge, where he became one of the army’s senior surgeons.
By this time even Warren had become convinced that his brother Joseph was in fact dead. “The loss of such a man,” John Eliot wrote, “in addition to our defeat, and at a time when the distracted state of our affairs greatly needed his advice, threw a gloom upon the circumstances of the people, and excited the most sincere lamentation and mourning.” One of the most strongly moved was Warren’s mentor and friend Samuel Adams. Writing from Philadelphia, Adams admitted to his wife that the death “of our truly amiable and worthy friend Dr. Warren is greatly afflicting. The language of friendship is, how shall we resign him! But it is our duty to submit to the dispensations of heaven.” For John Adams, Warren’s life and death served as a kind of cautionary tale. As head of the Committee of Safety, the Provincial Congress, and as a major general, the good doctor had taken on “too much for mortal.” “For God’s sake . . . ,” he wrote, “let us be upon our guard against too much admiration of our greatest friends.” But Adams’s wife, Abigail, took a different view. “We want [i.e., need] him in t
he senate, we want him in his profession, we want him in the field. We mourn for the citizen, the senator, the physician and the warrior.”
The delegates of the Provincial Congress proceeded to elect a new president and argue over the meaning of the battle that had just robbed them of the leader upon whom they’d come to depend. Some claimed that the fighting at Breed’s Hill represented a failed military opportunity that should have “terminated with as much glory to America as the 19th of April.” Others claimed that the encounter had done more for the provincial cause than anyone could have legitimately expected. “This battle has been of infinite service to us,” one observer insisted. Another recalled how the New England soldiers had returned from Charlestown “like troops elated with conquest [rather] than depressed with defeat . . . saying that a few such victories would restore America her liberty.” Or, as the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene wrote, “I wish [we] could sell them another hill at the same price.”
By the end of June, the commander of the provincial forces in Cambridge, General Artemas Ward, had learned that he was about to be replaced. In response to Massachusetts’s pleas back in May, the Continental Congress had not only addressed the issue of formalizing the province’s civil government by sanctioning the election of a new General Court; it had also assumed control of the army. To facilitate the provincial army’s transformation from a regional army into a truly continental force, Congress had decided to put the Virginia planter and former army officer George Washington at its head.
Washington had accepted his new position with great trepidation, insisting from the start that “I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” Not until he had left Philadelphia for Cambridge did he hear about the Battle of Bunker Hill. According to one account, he immediately asked the messenger if “the provincials stood the British fire.” When he was assured that they had, he responded, “Then the liberties of our country are safe.”
As Washington perhaps sensed, the Battle of Bunker Hill had been a watershed. What he didn’t realize was that the battle had convinced the British that they must abandon Boston as soon as possible. Now that the rebellion had turned into a war, the British knew they must mount a full-scale invasion if they had any hope of making the colonists see the error of their ways. Unfortunately, from the British perspective, Boston—hemmed in by highlands and geographically isolated from the colonies to the south—was not the place to launch a knockout punch against the enemy. Rather than become mired in an unproductive stalemate in Boston, the British army had to resume the fighting in a more strategically feasible location—either in New York or even farther to the south in the Carolinas. That was what Gage suggested in his correspondence that summer, and that was what the British ministry decided to do within days of learning of the battle on July 25. But, of course, Washington had no way of knowing what Gage and the ministers in London intended.
When he arrived in Cambridge on July 2, Washington was a long way from becoming the stoic icon that stares at us each day from the dollar bill. He might have impressed his fellow delegates at the Continental Congress as “sober, steady, and calm,” but as the painter Gilbert Stuart came to recognize, lurking beneath Washington’s deceptively placid exterior were “the strongest and most ungovernable passions.” “Had he been born in the forest,” the painter claimed, “he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.”
Washington, forty-three, with reddish hair and fair skin that burned in the sun, had assumed his duties as commander in chief with reluctance. Within weeks of his arrival in Boston, however, he had decided that he must end the siege with one dramatic stroke. Unaware of the enemy’s decision to evacuate, he was determined to destroy the British army before it had another opportunity to venture out of Boston. Washington was perfectly aware of the consequences of such a decision. By attacking the city itself, he would, in all likelihood, consign Boston to the flames.
Against all odds, Boston had so far endured. What remained to be seen was whether she would survive George Washington.
—
Even though they were an old and prominent family, the Washingtons were not rich enough to be considered genuine Virginia aristocracy. Washington’s father had died when he was eleven. The teenager’s best hope for achieving the social standing he craved was in the military, and in 1754, at the age of twenty-two, he was sent into the wilderness of modern western Pennsylvania to retake the fort at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers that the French had seized from the British and renamed Fort Duquesne. With the help of a group of Iroquois warriors led by Tanacharison, also known as the Half-King, Washington’s band of approximately forty soldiers attacked a smaller detachment of French. What happened next will never be completely known, in large part because Washington did his best to downplay the brutal horror of the encounter. It seems likely that despite their best efforts to surrender, the French, who claimed to be on a diplomatic mission, were slaughtered by Washington’s combined Indian and English force. According to one account, Washington was attempting to communicate with the enemy’s wounded leader Jumonville when Tanacharison clove the Frenchman’s skull in two with a tomahawk and proceeded to wash his hands in Jumonville’s mangled brains.
Washington later tried to depict the encounter as a kind of backwoods brawl. In truth, he had lost control of a situation that ultimately sparked the beginning of the French and Indian War. Several weeks later, by which time Washington’s native allies had abandoned him, the roles were reversed when the Virginians, now holed up at the Great Meadows, several miles from the skirmish scene in what Washington called Fort Necessity, were attacked by a large French force led by Jumonville’s brother. By nightfall, close to a third of Washington’s men were killed or wounded. Convinced that they were about to be massacred, the remnants of Washington’s force broke open the rum supply and proceeded to drink themselves into oblivion. Luckily, the French leader allowed the English to surrender the next morning on the condition that they not return to the region for a year. Somehow Washington survived this catastrophe with his reputation intact (a talent he would display throughout his life), and the following year he found himself in the midst of yet another slaughter when he and a young British officer named Thomas Gage were part of General Braddock’s disastrous attempt to take Fort Duquesne in 1755.
What remained of the first phase of Washington’s military career was devoted to righting the wrongs committed during this bloody baptism in the wilds of western Pennsylvania. Disgusted with the inadequacies of the undisciplined colonial militia, he wanted, more than anything else, an officer’s commission in the British army. The British army, however, did not want him, and in the years after the failed Braddock Expedition, he did his best to create his own provincial version of the regular army.
In 1755, Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie named Washington colonel of the Virginia Regiment. It was an unparalleled opportunity for an aspiring twenty-three-year-old American officer—a chance to organize a group of a thousand full-time soldiers, their salaries paid by the colony. Washington proved to be a tough disciplinarian, whipping malcontents and hanging deserters at a rate that equaled, if not exceeded, what prevailed in the British army. He designed his own distinctive uniforms that ultimately led to the regiment being called “the Blues.” After just a year of defending the colony’s frontier, the Blues had become the toughest, best-trained group of soldiers in America. “If it should be said,” he wrote Governor Dinwiddie, “that the troops of Virginia are irregulars, and cannot expect more notice than other provincials, I must beg leave to differ and observe in turn that we want nothing but commissions from His Majesty to make us as regular a corps as any upon the continent.”
By that time, the focus of the French and Indian War had shifted to the north, and Washington and his regiment toiled in relative obscurity. But in 1758 he finally got his chance to step into the limelight. General John Forbes had been ordered to venture to the re
gion where Washington’s military career had begun and take Fort Duquesne. Forbes proved surprisingly receptive to almost all of Washington’s ideas and suggestions; unfortunately, the young colonel’s frustrations with the British military establishment had reached the point that he was unable to contain his resentment. Surly and recalcitrant throughout the planning of this arduous campaign, he seemed almost disappointed when after hacking their way through the wilderness the British army discovered that the French had burned and fled the fort, thus giving Forbes a well-deserved, if anticlimactic, victory. Soon after, Washington announced his retirement from the military.
Some have speculated that Washington’s petulant behavior during the Forbes campaign could be attributed to something besides the hurt he felt at being denied a commission in the British army. In 1758 he was on the verge of marrying the wealthiest widow in Virginia, Martha Custis. Unfortunately, he’d also managed to fall in love with his best friend’s wife, Sally Fairfax. But just as he had helped to assuage his frustrations with the regular army by creating a regiment that was “more British than the British,” he contained his unruly passions for the beautiful and aristocratic Sally by marrying the woman who enabled him to attain the wealth and social standing to which he’d always aspired.
In the years ahead, the New York statesman Gouverneur Morris came to know Washington well. Like the painter Gilbert Stuart, Morris recognized that “boiling in his bosom [were] passion[s] almost too mighty for man.” Washington was destined to become one of the foremost generals of his age, but “his first victory,” Morris maintained, “was over himself.”