4

“TO SUBDUE THE BAD” FROM CONCORD TO BUNKER HILL, APRIL-JUNE 1775

The … sanguinary measures adopted by the British Ministry … threatening to involve this Continent in all the horrors of a civil War, obliges us to call for the united aid and council of the Colony, at this dangerous crisis.

—New York Provincial Congress¹

Late on the night of April 18, 1775, a force of about nine hundred Redcoats and marines² boarded Royal Navy longboats at a deserted Boston beach. They were rowed across Back Bay to an isolated point of Cambridge land, owned by a Tory, where a road led to the Rebel arms cache at Concord. Long before the next dawn the troops were on the march, heading for what would be the start of the Revolutionary War.³ Alongside some of the British forces during that long and bloody day were a number of Loyalists, anonymous comrades of the British soldiers.

Some Loyalists joined with the Regulars, straggling along, carrying muskets, wearing civilian clothes, and drawing taunts from people who would remember those Tory faces. Other Loyalists, referred to in accounts simply as “Tory guides,” served unseen and remain un-known.⁴ Those who are identified include Edward Winslow, well remembered in Plymouth as a founder of the Old Colony Club, and his childhood friend George Leonard.⁵

Three others known to have served the king that day were Thomas K. Beaman,⁶ Daniel Murray, and his brother Samuel. Beaman, who had been a captain of militia in the French and Indian War, lived in Petersham, about thirty miles north of Worcester. He was reported to be one of Gage’s intelligence agents; that would explain his presence as a “guide,” often used as a polite term for spy.⁷ Family tradition has Thomas Beaman’s only brother, Joseph, also heading for battle that day—as a minuteman.⁸ John Murray, a mandamus councillor whose home had been attacked in 1774, was the father of Daniel and Samuel. (Murray’s daughter was the wife of Daniel Bliss of Concord, who had aided Gage’s roaming officer-spies.)

For all five known Tory allies, their work that day began their military careers as Loyalists. Beaman would serve the British Army as a provincial officer handling supply-wagon trains. Daniel Murray would become the captain of a Loyalist volunteer company whose members included his two brothers; later he became a major in the King’s American Dragoons.⁹ Leonard took command of a small fleet of ships that raided New England seacoast towns,¹⁰ and Winslow would be commissioned as muster master general, responsible for keeping track of all the Loyalist armed forces in North America.¹¹

Daniel Murray’s war began when he was accompanying Royal Marine lieutenant Jesse Adair at the head of the advance British force on the road to Concord. Around four a.m., near Menotomy (now Arlington), they heard hoofbeats on the road ahead. Assuming the horsemen were express riders spreading reports of the march, Murray and Adair waited until the riders neared, then dashed from the side of the road to seize the horses’ bridles. After appropriating the horses, Murray and Adair forced the Patriots, Asahel Porter and Josiah Richardson, to march along with the troops.¹² This was the first action of the day.

General Gage possessed enough intelligence to provide his Concordstrike force with a map showing exactly where militiamen had hidden “Artillery, Ammunition, Provisions, Tents, Small Arms and … Military Stores.” He gave detailed instructions on how to disable discovered cannons and what to do with other stocks: “The Powder and flower [flour] must be shook out of the Barrels into the River, the Tents burnt, Pork or Beef destroyed in the best way you can devise. And the Men may put Balls of lead in their pockets, throwing them by degrees into Ponds, Ditches &c., but no Quantity together so that they may be recovered afterwards.”¹³

As the British marched off toward Lexington, the alarm had already been spreading along that same Cambridge road.

The British had learned that Sam Adams and Hancock—two of the “principal actors & abettors” Lord Dartmouth wanted arrested—were somewhere in Lexington. The two Rebel leaders, along with Hancock’s fiancée, Dorothy Quincy, and his aunt Lydia, had been staying at the parsonage of the Reverend Jonas Clarke in Lexington. Dr. Joseph Warren, watching over Boston in Adams’s absence, had sent Paul Revere and William Dawes, by separate routes, to Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the Regulars were coming. (Dr. Church learned of Revere’s ride from his wife, Rachel, who wrote Paul a letter—” take the best care of yourself”—with £150 enclosed, and entrusted it to Church to deliver. Church passed the letter on to Gage; what happened to the money is not known.)¹⁴

Revere and Dawes reached Lexington at just about the time the British had begun their march. Arriving separately, the two riders stopped to warn Hancock and Adams, then set off for Concord.¹⁵ On the road they met Samuel Prescott, a young doctor heading home to Concord after an evening spent courting a Lexington woman. A mounted British patrol stopped the riders. Dawes and Prescott managed to gallop away, Dawes back to Lexington, Prescott to Concord. Revere, his horse taken, was held for a while and later released. Other riders, part of a complex militia warning system, sped the Concord Alarm throughout Middlesex County.

About seventy militiamen were mustered on the Lexington green when the leading British troops came up the road.¹⁶ Asahel Porter, who had been captured by Murray and Adair, was near the head of the column. Adair wheeled his forward companies toward the militiamen. “No sooner did they come in sight of our company,” Clarke later wrote, “but one of them, supposed to be an officer of rank”—apparently Adair—” was heard to say to the troops, ‘Damn them! We will have them!’” Porter tried to run away from his captors, but he had been doomed by the chance encounter with a British officer and his Loyalist ally. Shot as he ran, he was one of eight Patriots killed at Lexington.¹⁷ What happened next to Daniel Murray is not known. The names and exploits of Loyalist volunteers did not usually find their way into official British battle reports.

Capt. John Parker, commander of the Lexington militia, was a battle-hardened veteran of Rogers’ Rangers in the French and Indian War. He knew what to do when he saw the size of the British force and realized how outnumbered he was. “I immediately ordered our Militia to disperse and not to fire,” he later wrote.¹⁸ Maj. John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines, who led the British advance guard into Lexington, said in his official account that when his men got within one hundred yards of the militiamen “they began to File off towards some stone Walls on our Right Flank… . I instantly called to the Soldiers not to Fire,” and “some of the Rebels who had jumped over the Wall, Fired Four or Five Shott at the Soldiers.”

After the militiamen fired more shots, Pitcairn wrote, “without any order or Regularity, the Light Infantry began a scattered Firing … contrary to the repeated orders both of me and the officers that were present.”¹⁹ Militiamen’s accounts quote Pitcairn as ordering the Rebels to disperse and then shouting: “Damn you! Why don’t you lay down your arms?” Another remembered an officer yelling: “Disperse, you damned Rebels! You dogs, run! Rush on, my boys!”²⁰ The men kept on shooting until officers managed to get them under control.

“We had a man of the 10th Light Infantry wounded, nobody else was hurt,” a British officer later wrote. “We then formed on the Common, but with some difficulty, the men were so wild they could hear no orders.” He could not tell how many Rebels were killed “becausethey were behind walls and into the woods… . We waited a considerable time there, and at length proceeded our way to Concord.”²¹

Neither Revere nor Dawes had reached Concord, but Prescott had, and his news started the Concord Alarm. “This morning between one and two o-clock we were alarmed by the ringing of the bell,” wrote the Reverend William Emerson, whose name was on the Militia Alarm List. Local militiamen began assembling at Wright’s Tavern while militias from other towns headed for Concord.²² A militia officer sent a rider galloping off to Lexington to see if the British were there. He arrived back to report the Lexington firefight.

People in Concord hurried about, finding new hiding places for hoards of ammunition, arms, and supplies. About one hundred and fifty eager young minutemen wanted to confront the British as they approached Concord. But militias were democratic, and a majority voted for a strategic withdrawal to a ridge north of town. Others crossed the North Bridge across the Concord River.

When the British troops arrived, they split into three groups: one at the North Bridge, confronting the minutemen; another in town as a search party for Rebel caches; and a third that crossed the North Bridge to the farm of Col. James Barrett, a French and Indian War veteran who was commander of the militia and overseer of the biggest caches of arms and provisions. Barrett’s collection included twenty thousand pounds of musket balls and cartridges, fifteen thousand canteens, a great number of tents and tools, seventeen thousand pounds of salt fish, thirty-five thousand pounds of rice, and large quantities of beef and pork.²³ A great deal of the supplies had been rehidden in nearby towns before the British arrival.

As militiamen began streaming into Concord from other towns, the Patriot force beyond the bridge grew to at least five hundred men, strung out along a ridge overlooking the town center, now populated only by women, children, and men too old or infirm for militia service. British soldiers moved among the glowering residents, dug up three cannons, and knocked off their trunnions, the projections forming an axis on which a cannon pivots up or down; this was the fastestway of disabling the weapon. And they discovered only a small portion of the Rebel stores they had come to find.

Disobeying Gage’s orders, the weary searchers did not load their pockets with bullets. Instead they dumped a large amount of bullets into a millpond, from which they would be recovered the next day. The soldiers piled up wooden gun carriages and set fire to them. They cut down the flag-flying Liberty pole and burned that, too. A couple of buildings began to burn, apparently because of carelessness. The soldiers, who had been ordered not to destroy property, joined the citizens in dousing the fires.

On the ridge, militiamen saw the smoke curling up. Barrett, suddenly in command of townsmen and strangers alike, had good reason to hold back from battle. He faced a superior force and lacked any authority to fire on the British, who had not fired upon his men. Barrett’s adjutant was the minuteman Joseph Hosmer, whom, the Loyalist Daniel Bliss had not long before called Concord’s most dangerous man. Now the fiery Patriot pointed to the smoke rising from the center of Concord, turned to his commanding officer, and said, “Will you let them burn the town down?” Other officers spoke up. Capt. Isaac Davis, who had led his minutemen down the road from Acton, said, “I haven’t a man who is afraid to go.”

Barrett ordered his men to load their muskets. Many of them remembered that he told them to withhold their fire until the British fired. The militiamen advanced from the ridge, downward toward the North Bridge and the Regulars. The British soldiers pulled back from the bridge, ripping up planks. They formed a volley-firing formation on the other side of the bridge and opened fire, killing Captain Davis and a private.

At a range of about fifty yards the militiamen responded with a volley that killed four of the eight British officers at the bridge. Milling about in panic and confusion, the British began a ragged retreat. Their fat, inept commander, Lt. Col. Francis Smith, managed to get control and stop the retreat. A young American—never positively identified—walked up to a badly wounded Redcoat and, in the wordsof the Reverend Emerson, “not being under the feelings of humanity, very barbarously broke his skull and let his brains out with a small ax,” an auxiliary weapon for many militiamen. “The poor object lived an hour or two before he expired.”²⁴

This first known atrocity of the Revolution would cast a long shadow. Some Patriots would deny it happened, but it triggered savage acts of hate, revenge, and retribution involving British versus Rebels—and Tories versus Rebels.²⁵ British soldiers, angry in retreat, saw the bloody head of their comrade. An enduring rumor swept through their ranks: The Rebels are scalping their foes. The rumor even found its way into official reports. One said that Rebels had “scalped and cut off the ears of some of the wounded men who fell into their hands.”²⁶

The British withdrew from Concord, bearing some of their wounded in commandeered horse-drawn open carriages. Smith led them to the road they had taken from Lexington. “When we arrived within a mile of Lexington, our ammunition began to fail, and … we began to run rather than retreat in order,* wrote Henry De Ber-niere in his report to Gage. A month before, De Berniere had been a Gage spy in Concord. On his return to Concord as a soldier, De Berniere survived to report 73 men killed, 154 wounded, and 21 missing.3 American losses were estimated to be 50 killed and/or dead of wounds, 39 wounded, and 5 missing.²⁷

Some thirty-six hundred militiamen were assembling in, or heading for, Lexington.²⁸ Around noon, as the British reached a bend in the road, militiamen struck, ambushing the staggering columns. The militiamen fired from behind rocks, trees, and stone walls on both sides of the narrow road. Several British, many of them targeted officers, were killed. Sergeants took over, leading their men about five hundred yards farther down the road—and into another ambush. About thirty men fell, dead or wounded. Survivors struggled on toward Lexington. Militiamen on a hill fired down, wounding Colonel Smith and knocking him from his saddle. Redcoats charged the hill, killing at least one militiaman. Pitcairn’s horse bolted, throwing himto the ground. Some men stumbled to the side of the road, unable to march any farther. That morning the British had outnumbered the Rebels. In this murderous afternoon, the British were outnumbered, and, it seemed, doomed.

Nearly twelve hours before, Colonel Smith, suddenly aware that the militias were rising, had sent a courier to Gage in Boston asking for reinforcements. Gage had dispatched a brigade under his adjutant, Brig. Gen. Lord Hugh Percy. As the eldest son of the Duke of Northumberland, Percy would inherit the dukedom and an immense fortune, if he did not die on a battlefield. A soldier for half of his thirty-two years, he had arrived in Boston in 1774 as commander of his regiment, the Fifth Foot. He developed a haughty dislike for Bostonians—” a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascalls, cruel, & cowards. I must own I cannot but despise them compleately,” he wrote to a cousin in England soon after his arrival.²⁹

Now, riding at the head of about one thousand men and two field guns, with fifes and drums playing “Yankee Doodle,” Percy marched with other Americans—Friends of the King, armed Loyalists in civilian clothes, including Winslow, George Leonard, and Samuel Murray. Winslow later reported that his horse had been shot from under him and that Percy had personally cited him for bravery.³⁰ Murray was captured that day and taken to a jail in Worcester. On June 15 he was released “to his father’s homestead in Rutland,” about sixty miles west of Boston.³¹

The other Loyalists who accompanied Percy are not known. But curiously, there is a record showing that on April 19 a number of “gentlemen volunteers” joined the Loyal American Association under the command of Brigadier Ruggles.³² Some of those gentlemen probably marched off with Percy.

A record in Gage’s files states Leonard’s role: “George Leonard of Boston deposes that he went from Boston on the nineteenth of April with the Brigade commanded by Lord Percy upon their march to Lexington. That being on horseback and having no connexion with the army, he several times went forward of the Brigade.” On a sortie as a spy for Percy about a mile south of Lexington, Leonard met awounded man who “said Some of our pepol fired upon the Regulars; and they fell on us Like Bull Dogs and killed eight & wounded nineteen.” Leonard reported that two other men had told him the same. He added a line that would please Gage, who officially emphasized that the Rebels had fired the first shot at Lexington: “All three Blamed the rashness of their own pepol for fireing first.”³³

Instead of marching along the longboat-to-Cambridge route that Smith’s force had taken, Percy led his brigade across Boston Neck, through Roxbury and Brookline, to the Great Bridge that crossed the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. Patriots had removed the bridge planks. Percy, anticipating this, had brought along tools, planks, and carpenters. But the thrifty Patriots had put the removed planks nearby, so all Gage’s craftsmen had to do was walk along the risers, retrieve the planks, and replace them.³⁴

In Cambridge, a lieutenant noted, “few or no people were to be seen; and the houses were in general shut up.”³⁵ Percy had hoped for some intelligence from friendly Tories. When he asked a citizen for directions to the Lexington road, the man courteously obliged—and was spotted giving aid to a Redcoat. He was so harassed by angry Patriots that he quickly got out of town.³⁶

As Percy’s men neared Lexington, they heard a rattle of musketry and then saw, under a cloud of dust up the road, the swirling panic of Smith’s force. Percy stopped at Lexington, scanned the scene before him, and acted swiftly. He put his field pieces on two hills and fired on the militiamen, who backed off, stunned. Percy had his men form a hollow square that encompassed the road and stretches of land on either side. The square opened to admit Smith’s exhausted troops, “their tongues hanging out of their mouths, like those of dogs after a chase.”³⁷ Within the defensive square were houses. Percy, seeing them as snipers’ nests, ordered them burned. Flanking troops forced their way into other houses, and, a lieutenant later wrote, “All that were found in the houses were put to death.”³⁸ Another officer noted, however, that “some soldiers who staid too long in the houses were killed in the very act of plundering by those who lay concealed in them.”³⁹ On the march back to Boston, Percy later wrote, his men were “underincessant fire, which like a moving circle surrounded and followed us wherever we went.” As many as five thousand militiamen hounded the British along the eleven-mile gauntlet. The sun had nearly set when the brigade reached Cambridge, where Patriots waited in still another ambush. Redcoats on the flank found them, killing three. Instead of returning on the morning’s route, Percy surprised his pursuers by crossing Charlestown Neck, between the Charles and Mystic rivers, to the hills of Charlestown, protected by the guns of HMS Somerset, anchored near the Charlestown ferry slip.

Percy met with the selectmen of Charlestown and negotiated an armistice. He promised to restrain his men, and the town promised not to attack the troops as they took Somerset longboats and other craft to reach Boston and the refuge of their garrisons.⁴⁰ Percy’s appraisal of his foe had changed. “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob,” he wrote the next day in a letter, “will find himself much mistaken; they have men amongst them who know very well what they are about… .”⁴¹

The battle reverberated the next day in Marshfield, where about one hundred soldiers of the Queen’s Guards had been quartered on the estate of Nathaniel Ray Thomas. Reacting to the attack on Lexington and Concord, militias near Marshfield began preparing for a massive attack on the Guards. On the road to Marshfield, a militia officer, Maj. Judah Alden, happened to meet a slave named Cato.4 The slave told Alden that Captain Balfour had sent him out as a scout to watch for Rebels. Alden told Cato to go back to Balfour and tell him that he had seen a large militia force on its way to Marshfield.

The next morning some five hundred militiamen did march on Marshfield. Crews of fishing boats spotted the marchers and came ashore to join them. But, as the Patriots were preparing to advance on the Thomas estate and attack the Guards, two sloops hove into sight. They anchored off Brant Rock, near Plymouth, and sent off boats for the Guards, who successfully escaped to Boston. The Patriots, primedfor a fight, had to be satisfied with collecting the equipment and supplies left behind in the Guards’ hasty withdrawal.⁴²

A week before the battles of Concord and Lexington, Rebel militiamen from the Taunton area had struck. A large force marched on the Tory-dominated Assonet section of Freetown, about thirty-five miles south of Boston, where the Loyalist militant Thomas Gilbert, aided by his brother Samuel, had organized a Tory countermilitia armed by Gage and nicknamed “Gilbert’s Banditti” by the Patriots. Gilbert claimed to have raised and commanded three hundred Loyalists. In the melee, Samuel Gilbert later said, he lost the sight of his right eye and was rendered “deaf and Stupified by the Blow” he had received to make him sign “what Paper the Rebels desired.”⁴³

The attackers took the muskets, powder, and bullets stored in Gilbert’s house and seized twenty-nine of Gilbert’s men, who were later released. Some fled to Boston, but most of the Loyalists remained in Assonet to await whatever was going to happen next.⁴⁴

The Gilbert raid was inspired by a letter that he had written in March 1775 to Capt. Sir James Wallace, commanding officer of HMS Rose, on station off Newport, Rhode Island. In the letter, which was somehow intercepted by the Patriots and made public, Gilbert said he feared an attack by “thousands of the Rebels” and asked Wallace to dispatch some of his small boats, called tenders, up the Taunton River as rescue vessels if the Gilbert men needed to evacuate.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress responded to the letter by declaring that Gilbert was “an inveterate enemy to his country, to reason, to justice, and the common rights of mankind” and that “whoever had knowingly espoused his cause, or taken up arms for its support, does, in common with himself, deserve to be instantly cut off from the benefit of commerce with, or countenance of, any friend of virtue, America, or the human race.” This withering declaration foreshadowed the campaign to drive the Loyalists from, if not the human race, at least Massachusetts.

After the declaration was published, Gilbert disappeared and made his way to sanctuary aboard the Rose. He had not been at home during the raid, which focused on his son-in-law, who had hidden ina kitchen oven. He was hauled out, placed backwards on his horse, and led off to the Taunton jail. Before the procession reached the jail, Thomas Gilbert and his slave Pompey appeared. Gilbert, who had hurried back to Assonet when he got word of a looming attack, faced down the crowd and demanded the release of his son-in-law. The crowd, cowed by the old soldier, let his son-in-law go.⁴⁵ Gilbert and his family soon joined the growing Tory community in Boston.

The militiamen in Marshfield and Taunton, like those who had responded to the Concord Alarm, acted on the orders—often preceded by a democratic vote—of local commanders. Now that a war had begun, there was no overall strategy, no plans for continuing to resist British troops, no policy for dealing with Loyalists, who overnight had become belligerents in a war. The Committee of Safety, the de facto executive branch of the Massachusetts provincial congress, immediately decided that the militias should be drawn together into an army.

The committee also chartered the Quero, a swift American schooner, to race across the Atlantic and secretly deliver the Patriots’ version of events to the British public before Gage’s official report reached the king’s ministers. Fearing that Tory spies would learn of the Quero‘s mission, Dr. James Warren, chairman of the Committee of Safety, told the ship’s captain to sail evasively to “escape all enemies that may be in the chops of the channel,” adding: “You are to keep this order a profound secret from every person on earth.”⁴⁶ The captain, Richard Derby, Jr., was the son of the Salem mariner who had refused to hand over his cannons to British troops in February 1775.⁴⁷

The Quero, sailing without cargo, crossed speedily. It boldly passed the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth and slipped into an Isle of Wight harbor. Derby secretly made his way to London on May 28. A letter accompanying Warren’s report was addressed to Ben Franklin, who for many years had been acting as an agent for Massachusetts and other colonies. The letter asked Franklin to spread the news. But Franklin had left London and sailed for Philadelphia on March 25; he would arrive in Philadelphia on May 5.⁴⁸Nevertheless the news didspread. English newspapers published the report; the London Evening Post even reprinted the Gazette’s account. Gage’s terse report, dated April 22 and borne by a heavily laden merchant ship, arrived in London two weeks later.⁴⁹Many British readers of Gage’s official report gave more credence to the Patriot version, which made Britain the instigator of the attacks.

Back in Massachusetts, the militiamen assembling in Cambridge, Roxbury, and Charlestown got an overall commander selected by the Committee of Safety: Maj. Gen. Artemas Ward, a big rugged man who owned a prosperous farm in Shrewsbury. He was a classic citizen soldier. After graduating from Harvard in 1748, he entered politics, serving in the General Court and for a time appearing to be on the Tory path. During the French and Indian War, he became a lieutenant colonel in a regiment that took part in a campaign to capture Fort Ticonderoga. After the war he was appointed colonel of his royal militia regiment and a judge in the Court of Common Pleas.

As soon as Ward joined the opposition to the Stamp Act, Massachusetts royal governor Francis Bernard revoked his militia commission. Ward later said that he told Bernard, “I consider myself twice honored, but more in being superseded, than in having been commissioned … since the motive that dictated it is evidence that I am, what he is not, a friend to my country.”⁵⁰ Bernard’s successor, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, called Ward “a very sulky fellow, who I thought I could bring over by giving him a commission in the provincial forces … but I was mistaken.”⁵¹

When an express rider arrived with the news that the British were on their way to Concord, Ward was in bed, suffering from bladder stones. At daybreak he painfully eased himself out of bed and rode thirty-five miles to Cambridge.⁵² Within days he was in command of an army of about twenty thousand armed men from all over New England.⁵³

There was no way to know how long any of the sudden soldiers would stay. Although they were not able to launch an attack on the British, geography made them into besiegers of a city that was a near-island, linked to the rest of Massachusetts by Boston Neck. Militiamen in Cambridge confronted Gage’s troops across the Neck; those in Charlestown faced the British across a narrow stretch of water. Rebel troops formed a semicircle around the city.

On Gage’s fortified and garrisoned Boston Neck, Patriots hastily raised their own fortifications. The Neck became the border between the king’s friends and the king’s foes. Tories fled into Boston and Patriots poured out, driven not so much by fear of neighbors as by fear of war or by a desire to join other Patriots.

Notorious Tories who had tarried too long sped toward Gage’s protection. On the day of the attacks on Lexington and Concord, Dr. Josiah Sturtevant of Halifax galloped the six miles to Boston so fast that it was said he lost his saddlebags. He was commissioned a British Army captain and put in charge of a military hospital.⁵⁴ Abijah Willard, a mandamus councillor who had been attacked and imprisoned, entered Boston after the Battle of Lexington, offered his services to Gage, and was commissioned a captain in the first company of Brigadier Ruggles’s paramilitary Loyal American Association.

Cambridge became the nerve center of the Patriots. Huge vacated homes along Tory Row filled with Patriot officers and their men. The colonnaded mansion of John Vassall, who had already lost his hay and stables to the Patriots, became the headquarters of General Ward. Here was Tory Row at its grandest: The vestibule’s massive mahogany doors, “studded with silver,” opened into a wide hall, “where tessellated floors sparkled under the light of a lofty dome of richly painted glass,” a peacetime visitor wrote. “Underneath the dome two cherubs carved in wood extended their wings, and so formed the center, from which an immense chandelier of cut glass depended. Upon the floor beneath the dome there stood a marble column, and around it ran a divan formed of cushions covered with satin of Damascus of gorgeous coloring… . All the paneling and woodwork consisted of elaborate carving done abroad.”⁵⁵

Troops set up tents and shelters on the greensward of Cambridge Common. They occupied the brick buildings of Harvard, whoseclasses would soon be suspended to make room for militiamen, by order of the Committee of Safety. Militiamen also made a barracks of Christ Church, abandoned by its fleeing Loyalist congregation.

Ward’s makeshift army had little artillery and consisted of men who had come to fight a battle, not a war. Many of his soldiers had been summoned by a piece of paper handed out by twenty-three-year-old Israel Bissell of East Windsor, Connecticut, who rode off from Watertown, near Boston. Tradition has him shouting “To arms, to arms, the war has begun!” on his four-day journey. He carried a concise report written on the morning of the battles by a member of the Committee of Safety; the report politely requested that the news be spread and that people supply Bissell with fresh horses.

After alerting General Ward in Shrewsbury, Bissell kept on riding down the Boston Post Road. His first horse died in Worcester. He got another horse and galloped on. At each stop he handed the report to a Patriot leader, who quickly hand copied it and distributed more copies in his area. The ritual continued in town after town until Bissell got to Philadelphia, where a bell, soon to be called the Liberty Bell, pealed, drawing thousands to assemble and learn the news.⁵⁶

When Bissell had reached New Haven, Connecticut, early on the afternoon of April 21, a town meeting was hastily called. The majority, which included a number of suspected Loyalists, voted against sending armed aid to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. This did not go down well with Benedict Arnold, the thirty-four-year-old captain of an elite Connecticut militia, the Governor’s Second Company of Foot. He immediately sent runners off to round up members and volunteers for a march to Cambridge. On the morning of Saturday, April 22, before a large crowd, Arnold paraded his men, resplendent in uniforms of scarlet coats with buff facings, white breeches and stockings, and black half leggings.

Arnold sent an aide to the town selectmen, who were meeting in Hunt’s Tavern. In Arnold’s name the aide asked for gunpowder and bullets from the town magazine. When the selectmen refused, Arnold marched his company to the tavern and sent in a messenger for the keys. Rebuffed again, he said that if he did not get the keys hewould order his men to break down the door to the magazine. Arnold got the keys, supplied his men with ammunition, and marched them north to Cambridge.⁵⁷

In 1758 Arnold had been a militiaman in the futile British-American attack on Fort Ticonderoga, which commanded the strip of land between Lake Champlain and Lake George on the route to Canada. Artemas Ward had also fought at Ticonderoga, and when Arnold reached Cambridge, he suggested an attack on Ticonderoga to seize its cannons. Ward approved the plan. The Massachusetts provincial congress commissioned Arnold as a colonel for “a secret service,” provided him a small amount of money and supplies, and on May 3 he was off. Seven days later, after an odyssey that brought Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys into the war, Ticonderoga fell without a shot, as did Crown Point, a smaller fort a few miles north.

Arnold’s bold move extended the war into New York and its disputed northern frontier—without any authority beyond the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the Committee of Safety. Coincidentally, Ti-conderoga fell on the same day that the Second Continental Congress assembled in the State House in Philadelphia with delegations from every colony but Georgia. The delegates did not learn about Ticonderoga until May 18, and the reaction was more embarrassment than joy. The New York and Connecticut delegations denied responsibility. Congress, uneasy about the sudden warfare, ordered Arnold and Allen to keep the king’s cannons and other property safe until that time when “the former harmony with Great Britain and these colonies so ardently wished for” is restored.⁵⁸

In Boston there was no hint of harmony. In early May, British soldiers, beginning to feel the paranoia of a siege, heard rumors of a Rebel plot to slip assassins into the city. According to the rumor, the Rebels would stage a feint that would sound an alarm, officers would rush from their lodgings—and be shot. Gage may have believed the rumor because he ordered officers to move into barracks, an order that violated a long tradition of separate quartering for officers and enlisted men. Civilians were also growing fearful. “Numbers of People are quitting the Town every day with their families and Effects,” a

British lieutenant wrote; “it’s a distressing thing to see them, for half of ‘em don’t know where to go to, and in all probability must starve.”⁵⁹ On May 25 HMS Cererbus arrived in Boston, delivering three major generals: William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne. Gage was still officially the field commander, but he now had the three generals looking over his shoulder and urging action. Burgoyne, a flamboyant part-time playwright whose nickname was “Gentleman Johnny,” made a comment that was widely circulated: “What! Ten thousand peasants keep five thousand king’s troops shut up? Well, let us in, and we’ll soon find elbow room!” The remark became so well known that Burgoyne got the additional nickname “Elbow Room.”⁶⁰ The siege was well into the month of June when Gage, in his role as royal governor, issued an excessively wordy proclamation, written by Burgoyne, declaring martial law and offering pardons to “those in arms and their abettors” who should lay down their weapons. The only Rebels ineligible for a pardon were Sam Adams and John Hancock, “whose offences are of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than that of condign punishment.” Left unsaid was the fact that the fitting punishment for treason was execution.⁶¹

The Patriots’ intelligence network had yet to discover that Dr. Benjamin Church was spying for the British. On May 12, as chairman of a subcommittee of the Committee of Safety, he signed a report recommending that a defensive system be established at several places on Charlestown Neck, including Bunker Hill.⁶² Oddly, Church seems not to have reported this to Gage because the British apparently had no knowledge of the Patriots’ imminent plans. Patriot agents had learned that Gates, goaded by Howe, was about to break out a force that would occupy the heights on the mile-long Charlestown Peninsula, separated from Boston by a narrow stretch of water.⁶³ In a preemptive move the Committee of Safety authorized the taking of Bunker Hill, the peninsula’s 110-foot high point.

Walking alone on the moonlit night of June 16, Major General Clinton was reconnoitering, looking across the dark water to the peninsula where British troops would soon be landing. He thought he heard some odd noises drifting across the water. He came upona British sentry. Yes, the sentry said, he had also heard what Clinton himself thought he had heard: unusual muffled sounds on those hills that loomed over Boston. From those heights, both general and sentry knew, the Rebels could fire down on British ships and British troops. Clinton hurried back to headquarters and told Howe and Gage that he was sure the Rebels were moving onto the high ground. He urged Gage to land a force next morning. But Gage wanted to wait until dawn, when he could see what the Rebels were doing.⁶⁴

The first British eyes to see what the Rebels were doing belonged to a lookout aboard HMS Lively, anchored off the southern shore of the peninsula. In the light of dawn he saw a large number of Rebels building a redoubt atop seventy-five-foot Breed’s Hill. Lively quickly opened fire. Soon, on the orders of Adm. Samuel Graves aboard HMS Somerset, all the British ships in the harbor began firing. But the broadsides had little effect on the Americans because the warships had trouble elevating their guns at a high-enough angle to reach the hilltop.⁶⁵

The lookout had spotted a few of the thousand militiamen who had assembled in Cambridge the night before. Their original orders had sent them off, silently and by lantern light, to Bunker Hill under the command of Col. William Prescott. There, throughout the night, they were to dig and build a redoubt. But at the last minute the objective was changed: Breed’s Hill, which was more accessible, would be fortified first. (Confusion over the hills’ names stems from the fact that both together were often called “Bunker Hill” while the southern slope was locally known as “Breed’s Hill.”)

Col. Richard Gridley, chief engineer of the Massachusetts forces, objected and was overruled. He then laid out a plan for a redoubt on Breed’s Hill; it would be about forty yards square, with a six-foot parapet on which gun platforms would be mounted. Two flanking entrenchments were designed so that attackers would be hit with enfilading fire about twenty yards beyond the face of the redoubt.

The soldiers grabbed spades and began digging into soil still hardened by frost.⁶⁶ “Cannon shot are continually rolling and rebounding over the hill,” wrote an American officer, “and it is astonishing to observe how little our soldiers are terrified by them.”⁶⁷

In Boston after the cannonading, Gage, his aides, and a Loyalist adviser went to Beacon Hill for a better view. Gage picked up his telescope and studied the redoubt that was emerging from Breed’s Hill. “Who appears to be in command?” he asked, handing the telescope to Col. Abijah Willard, the wealthiest landowner in Lancaster, forty-seven miles northwest of Boston. Willard had been commissioned a colonel during the French and Indian War, when he led a regiment in three major campaigns. Willard recognized Colonel Prescott, a tall man whose head and shoulders jutted from the rampart. He was a friend, a fellow officer in the previous war, and the husband of Willard’s sister Elizabeth.

“Will he fight?” asked Gage.

“I cannot answer for his men,” said Willard. “But Prescott will fight you to the gates of hell! “⁶⁸

It was a poignant moment for Willard. He had been made a mandamus councillor, had publicly recanted his appointment, had kept his own beliefs private, and had remained out of the strife. By his wealth and social position he was a Loyalist, just as Prescott could have been. But Prescott had chosen sides. So, finally and obliquely, had Willard. On the morning of April 19, he had filled his saddlebags with seeds for his farm in Beverly, north of Boston, and ridden along a route that would have taken him through Concord. When he came upon long columns of militiamen heading for Concord and Lexington, he realized he could not join them and had to oppose them. He turned toward Boston and sought refuge with Gage.⁶⁹

In the morning’s light Gage saw fortifications that had, in a British officer’s words, “appeared more like majick than the work of human beings.”⁷⁰ But still Gage did not believe the motley American army was a match for the two thousand men he would send on a frontal assault up Breed’s Hill, with General Howe leading the attack.

Early on the afternoon of June 17, Howe landed on the southern shore of the peninsula and first hit what appeared to be a weak spot along a narrow beach. Americans waited until the British were within fifty yards and, in a burst of fire, riddled the line of Redcoats, killing ninety-six. The rest of the attackers pulled back. Howecalled up soldiers and marines held in reserve. A second assault was also turned back. Dueling against snipers in houses in Charlestown, British artillery in Boston fired red-hot cannonballs and balls called “carcasses,” which were full of burning pitch. Much of the town went up in flames.

The third surge, led by General Clinton and aimed directly up the hill, reached the redoubt through diminishing fire because the Americans were running out of ammunition. Some were throwing rocks as British survivors stormed the redoubt. Attackers with bayonets and defenders using muskets as clubs fought in the bloody redoubt. Prescott, who battled bayonet-wielding Redcoats with his sword, later showed the bayonet holes in his waistcoat and banyan, a kind of robe he wore over his uniform.⁷¹ Under covering fire from reinforcements, the Americans retreated up Bunker Hill—which would give its name to a battle not fought there—and across Charlestown Neck. The British gave up pursuit.

Of the 1,500 Americans who defended the peninsula, about 450 were killed and wounded. Of the 2,400 British troops who landed on the peninsula, about 1,150 were killed or wounded; the Queen’s Guards who had slipped out of Marshfield were all but wiped out. Among the Rebel dead was Dr. Joseph Warren, who, though commissioned a major general, had volunteered to fight as a soldier. British marine major John Pitcairn, the savior at Lexington, was mortally wounded and carried to his deathbed by his wounded son, marine lieutenant William Pitcairn.⁷² “A dear bought victory, another such would have ruined us,” General Clinton later wrote.⁷³

Clinton, Howe, Burgoyne, and Gage now knew the answer to Gage’s impertinent question—” Will he fight?” But that question continued to hover over the relationship between British officers and their Loyalist allies. Veterans like Willard and Brigadier Ruggles could advise Gage. Lesser Loyalists could spy for him. Ruggles’s Loyal Americans could tear down abandoned wooden buildings and salvage the lumber for firewood.⁷⁴ But few Loyalists were given a chance to fight alongside British soldiers.

One of them was Gideon White, Jr., a charter member of the Old

Colony Club.⁷⁵ Another was John Coffin, son of the Nathaniel Coffin who, as the king’s cashier of customs at Boston, had one of the most lucrative royal posts in America. At eighteen John had been chief mate on a ship that in 1774 had brought reinforcements from England. Coffin met General Howe, who took a liking to the brash young man. Coffin joined the force that Howe led to the Battle of Bunker Hill. He survived and later raised the Orange Rangers, a mounted Tory rifle corps.⁷⁶

After Bunker Hill, Loyalists emerged as an auxiliary occupation force, helping the British tighten their control of the city. Sometime later a British general would declare that what started in Concord was a civil war: “I never had an idea of subduing the Americans. I meant to assist the good Americans to subdue the bad.”⁷⁷ The assistance began on the streets of Boston when General Gage reacted to his losses at Bunker Hill by starting to purge the city of Patriots.

* Later official British casualties were 65 killed, 157 wounded, and 27 missing.