The British Are Coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.

What Shall We Say of Human Nature?

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.