The glorious cause, p.36
The Glorious Cause, page 36
This reversal of policy was not accompanied by a declaration of independence; the Congress, of course, would not bring itself to such a step for another year. Yet while it shrank from committing itself clearly to either independence or reconciliation, it was beginning to act as if it were the representative of a sovereign nation. The decision to favor an invasion of Canada was only one sort of dramatic evidence of its disposition. A month before, even as it decided to petition the king for a redress of grievances and a restoration of peace and harmony, the Congress urged all the colonies to arm themselves. The next day, May 27, it appointed a committee on ways and means to secure military supplies. A week later it voted to borrow £6000 for the purchase of gunpowder. And on June 14 it decided to raise the Continental army by approving a plan calling for the recruitment of rifle companies from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, which would be added to the New England forces around Boston. Congress agreed to pay for these companies. It also appointed George Washington to head a committee charged with the responsibility for drawing up rules and regulations governing this army. An army required a chief, and the following day, June 15, Congress selected George Washington as commander of “all the continental forces, raised, or to be raised, for the defense of American liberty.” In the next few days the Congress proceeded to organize the army, select Washington’s major subordinates, and approve the army’s finances, a currency issue of $2,000,000.15
IV
While the Congress set about to organize the Continental army, two other armies, Britain’s in Boston and New England’s around it, came together for the bloody but indecisive battle of Bunker Hill. Neither side anticipated such a clash. Early in June, Gage decided to occupy Dorchester Heights, which had been ignored by everyone even though the area commanded Boston and had obvious strategic importance. Gage may have felt compelled to show some aggressiveness in order to satisfy his newly arrived colleagues, Major Generals William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton. This “triumvirate of reputation,” Burgoyne’s modest description of himself and his colleagues, arrived on the Cerberus late in May, and may have urged action. Their very presence be spoke the ministry’s dissatisfaction with Gage’s conduct, and he knew it. Feeling the need to do something, he ordered the move on the hills around Dorchester to begin on June 18. His intentions filtered out of Boston to the Massachusetts committee of safety a few days later, which then instructed General Artemas Ward, commander of American forces around Boston, to act before the British did and to seize Bunker Hill on the Charlestown peninsula along with the Dorchester Heights. The move to Bunker Hill was to be accomplished immediately, with the Dorchester hills to be taken later.16
General Artemas Ward, a Massachusetts farmer in quieter times, had fought in the French and Indian War twenty years earlier but had not, any more than any other American colonial, ever commanded an army. His inexperience may have led to a caution that often approached timidity. Ward hated to act, preferring to prepare, to husband resources, to dig in; he seems never to have felt ready for the bold stroke or the daring operation. He now had little choice, with the committee of safety demanding that the army exert itself and his subordinates in a council of war urging him on.17
Two among them proved too much to withstand. Connecticut furnished the more energetic, Brigadier Israel Putnam, a bear of a man, fifty-seven years old, a solid farmer, short in stature, thickset, bursting with energy, but lacking the thoughtfulness and perspective so valuable in a commander who feels himself buffeted by forces he cannot control. Putnam—”Old Put” in the legend that surrounded him—was a force, a natural force who had survived capture by the Iroquois in the French and Indian War and shipwreck on the coast of Cuba in an attempt to capture Havana. Putnam knew the attack and the smell of powder, but strategy, tactics, the careful plan which got the most out of men and supplies were as mysterious to him as the “new divinity” of western parsons. At the head of a regiment in assault he had few equals; in a staff meeting, few inferiors. Not surprisingly, he advocated the move on Charlestown peninsula. Joining him was Colonel William Prescott, forty-nine years of age, born of a distinguished and wealthy family, and commander of a Massachusetts regiment. Prescott rarely acted rashly; he exuded a quiet air that made men listen to him and heed his counsel. His approval of the proposal must have weighed heavily with Ward.
There were others in the council of war who favored the plan—General Seth Pomeroy of Connecticut, almost seventy years old, a veteran of the siege of Louisbourg in 1745, so steady in mind and manner as to seem immune to the madness that sometimes overpowers men facing the choice between battle and passivity. Joseph Warren, fresh from the Provincial Congress and awaiting his commission as a major general, also went along with the recommendation, though he may have shared Ward’s reluctance.
Reluctant or not, Ward placed Prescott in charge of a force of around a thousand men with orders to fortify Bunker Hill, the largest of three hills on Charlestown peninsula. The peninsula was a rough triangle of land, the base of which faced Boston, half a mile away across the Charles River. The top of the peninsula, about a mile to the northwest, was joined to the mainland by the “Neck,” never more than a few hundred feet in width and sometimes under water at high tide. To the northeast the Mystic River separated the peninsula from the mainland, and on the other side lay the bay where the Charles River widened. At its broadest point the peninsula was half a mile wide. Charlestown, a small village in peacetime but now almost deserted, covered the southwestern corner. Bunker Hill rose 300 yards from the Neck, reaching a height of 110 feet; 600 yards farther down lay Breed’s Hill, about 75 feet in height, with especially steep slopes on its eastern and western sides; Moulton’s Hill, only 35 feet high, sat at the southeastern corner where the Charles River and the Mystic River met. The ground between Breed’s and Moulton’s was broken by fenced pasturelands, brick kilns, clay pits, and a small swamp.
Prescott found his thousand-odd men assembled in Cambridge early in the evening of June 16. Two Massachusetts regiments besides his own, a Massachusetts artillery company of forty-nine men and two field-pieces led by Captain Samuel Gridley, and a working party of some two hundred men from Israel Putnam’s regiment commanded by Captain Samuel Knowlton made up the expedition. These men wore homespun and other sorts of civilian dress—there were no uniforms—and they carried muskets of every sort and variety. Each was supposed to carry a pack, rations for a day, and entrenching tools.
This party, led by Prescott, marched from Cambridge a little after nine that night. General Putnam met them at the Neck with wagons loaded with gabions (wicker baskets which were filled with dirt and used in fortifications) and fascines (tightly bundled brushwood and sticks, also used in setting up fortifications). Putnam seems also to have had a small number of tools and barrels, presumably to be used in constructing defenses. Shortly after the arrival at the Neck, Prescott sent a company into Charlestown with orders to watch for surprises from the British. The main body then moved down the peninsula and occupied Bunker Hill, stopping just short of Breed’s. Here Prescott and his officers, joined by Putnam and Colonel Richard Gridley, chief engineer of the army, decided that, despite the orders to fortify Bunker Hill, they would dig in on Breed’s. Their reasons are not entirely clear, but the fact that Breed’s was closer to Boston seems to have provided their principal justification. They also decided to keep a detachment on Bunker Hill and to dig in there once the principal work was completed on Breed’s.
Colonel Gridley now did his job, laying out a roughly square redoubt about 130 feet on a side, with an entrance on the side facing Bunker Hill, and apparently away from any attack the British might deliver. The side facing Charlestown had a redan, a two-sided, V-shaped earthwork, projecting outward. Midnight came by the time Gridley traced this fortification on the ground. That left about four hours before dawn for the troops to dig the fortification with its deep trenches and high earth walls. Those with picks and shovels fell to work immediately despite the heat of the night and the dust which rose from their digging. When first light broke, they had raised walls about six feet high on all sides, but they still had much to do.
First light made their task easier, but it also exposed them to the observation of ships swinging at anchor in the bay. The Lively saw them first and opened fire almost immediately. Soon after, Admiral Graves ordered the Lively to stop but after thinking the matter over started the fire up again, this time from other ships near by and from the battery on Copp’s Hill. This shelling did little damage, as the ships had difficulty elevating their guns high enough to bear on the hill, and the battery on Copp’s was out of effective range, but its noise unnerved many of Prescott’s men who had never endured battle before. Occasionally it was more than noise: it was deadly—one ball killed a soldier working outside the redoubt and another smashed two hogsheads filled with water, the entire supply brought for the troops, who were now dependent upon the wells in Charlestown. Just before noon, with the dust choking them and fatigue setting in—“We began to be almost beat out, being tired by our labor and having no sleep the night before”—Prescott’s men began to slip away.18 They were discouraged of course, and they had begun to suspect that they had been abandoned, for they believed that fresh troops were scheduled to relieve them after their night’s work. Prescott saw what was happening to his command; a lesser man might have given in to his troops’ anxieties. Prescott, however, concealed whatever doubts and fears he may have had and cajoled his troops to keep at the work of improving the redoubt. When persuasion seemed too little, he mounted the walls of the redoubt and exposed himself deliberately to the cannonade as if to show his men that the danger was in their heads, not in British cannon. There, standing over his troops, Prescott marched, sometimes shouting encouragement and orders—and sometimes harshly demanding of the men below that they ignore their thirst and hunger and the incoming rounds and get on with the job.
Putnam proved as brave, riding between Bunker and Breed’s and twice to Cambridge to demand reinforcements and supplies from Ward. Others, including members of the committee of safety, made similar requests, and after prolonged delay and indecision Ward set off two New Hampshire regiments. Zeal for work now led Putnam into a serious mistake: he urged Prescott to send him the entrenching tools necessary for the fortification of Bunker Hill. Prescott delayed as long as he could out of fear that the men who carried the tools would not return. With fewer than five hundred men in the redoubt, he realized that he could not spare a man. But Putnam persisted, promising that the men carrying the tools would be sent back, and Prescott finally gave in. Exactly how many men he set off cannot be known, but few returned—despite Putnam’s best intentions.
Before Prescott gave up his entrenching tools, and the “volunteers” to carry them back to Bunker Hill, he had used them to throw up a breastwork of about 330 feet in length extending from the southeastern corner of the redoubt northeast toward the Mystic River. Daylight had shown him how exposed he was, how vulnerable the redoubt to a flanking movement out of musket range along the side of the peninsula by the Mystic River. His other flank was nearly as open, though Charlestown and the troops in it gave some protection. The breastwork now gave some cover to his eastern flank though it remained exposed to a movement along the bank of the river.
Gage had awakened to the sound of the Lively’s cannonade. He probably had not slept well—the anxieties revealed in his letters of the previous month would keep any man from sleep. He worried about the mouths he had to feed in besieged Boston cut off from supplies from inland farms, and he worried over reports of the spreading rebellion. In May he had written Dartmouth that Connecticut and Rhode Island were in “open rebellion,” and to the south New York, Pennsylvania, and the southern colonies were arming. All this was disquieting, and nothing he saw the morning of June 17 on the Charlestown peninsula gave him confidence.19
Whether Gage said his prayers in the morning is not known, but he did appeal for counsel from the trinity at hand—Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne. They gave him what often issued from military advisers and staffs—conflicting advice—with Clinton proposing a landing in the rear of the redoubt and the use of the navy to keep reinforcements from coming down the Neck. A second landing at the foot of the peninsula would allow the British to squeeze the Americans to death. Clinton’s plan would have made effective use of the navy’s control of the water, but it violated the convention which held that an army should not allow itself to be trapped between two enemy forces. Gage objected to Clinton’s plan on this ground, and the others backed him. After further discussion they planned a landing on the southeastern corner, Moulton’s Point near the hill of the same name, movement along the side washed by the Mystic River, and an assault from the rear. Although this plan showed intelligence, the decision to land at Moulton’s Point did not. The tide was out and Gage had to wait until early afternoon to put Howe, who commanded the landing force, ashore. Landing at the Charlestown wharves might have been accomplished at any time and at small cost since they were lightly defended. By the time Howe’s force stepped on Moulton’s Point, the Americans had realized that their left flank was still vulnerable and had acted to defend it.20
Howe’s force included ten companies of light infantry, ten of grenadiers, four regiments, and parts of a fifth—about 1500 men in all. His reserve, around 700 rank and file from two regiments and two battalions of marines, was to remain at the battery until it was needed. Brigadier General Sir Robert Pigot served as Howe’s second in command.21
The troops embarked on twenty-eight large barges around noon and were rowed in two lines to Moulton’s Point. They made an awesome picture: sitting erect and motionless on the barges, their red coats raucous in the sunlight, muskets butt down with bayonets affixed, glittering and flashing as the sun blazed down. As the barges approached the land, the men-of-war intensified their bombardment, concentrating on the Neck to isolate the troops on Bunker and Breed’s, seeking also to soften up the redoubt and finally to clear the landing area itself. The ships alone could fire eighty guns, and Gage had augmented their fire with several floating batteries and with additional guns on Copp’s Hill. The smoke from all these guns drifted over the water accompanied by a nearly constant roar and flash.
Howe put his troops ashore at Moulton’s Point about one o’clock. No one contested this landing, and the soldiers were quickly placed in the conventional formation for attack: three long lines. Just as they arranged themselves, Howe ordered them to fall out and rest while he brought over the remainder of his 1500 men and a part of his reserve. The breastwork which had not been there when his plan of attack was approved now gave him pause and so did the movement of a column from Bunker Hill toward Breed’s—seemingly, he thought, reinforcements for the redoubt.
Had Howe known that Prescott was about to strengthen the American left flank even more, he might have struck at once. Prescott guessed correctly from Howe’s choice of a landing site that the main attack would be against the American left. And the uncovered ground east of the breastwork worried him so much that he sent Captain Knowlton and about 200 men to defend it. Their defensive line was not an extension of the breastwork, but rather a rail fence 200 yards northeast of it and roughly parallel to it. Knowlton’s men tore down another fence, rolled stones up against the first, and covered rails and stones with newly mown hay. This “work” appeared more formidable than it actually was. Shortly after Knowlton aligned his men behind the rail fence, the column of troops Howe had observed marched up and joined Knowlton’s men. These reinforcements were the two New Hampshire regiments Ward had so reluctantly dispatched, led by Colonels John Stark and James Reed. Stark showed immediately that he had brought brains and initiative as well as troops, for not only did he place troops with Knowlton at the fence, but he also set up a breastwork of stones along the water’s edge. There a beach ran along the Mystic, shielded from the field above by a dropoff—or bluff—of around nine feet. Though narrow, this beach was wide enough to permit a column of four or five files to pass along it.22
So punctilious in observing the convention which forbade placing troops between two enemy forces, Howe nevertheless threw out the rules in attacking the redoubt. The old casual feeling of superiority that puffed up imperial heads when they dealt with the “provincials” may have clouded his judgment. In any case, he ignored standard military doctrine which held that fortified positions should be attacked by columns, not by the extended lines he now chose to use in deploying his troops. An attack in columns permitted rapid movement and a concentrated assault by a mass of men. The theory was Wolfe’s and had made its way into manuals of tactics. The intention was to deprive defenders within entrenchments of the advantage of picking off attackers-in-line before they could close for bayonet work. Wolfe had recommended that small parties of sharpshooters be placed between columns with orders to fire at the top of the parapet so as to divert the defenders’ fire. The columns would rush the entrenchments quickly and overpower the defenders by sheer mass.23
On Howe’s far right along the beach skirting the Mystic, he did use a column for the attack—he had no choice—placing eleven companies of light infantry in a column of fours. Above the beach, he had another twenty-six companies in two lines, the front rank composed of grenadiers. This force was to attack the rail fence; Howe joined the soldiers himself and braved American fire with them. He may have lacked skill and imagination; he did not lack courage.24
These thirty-seven companies composed the British right. Howe gave Pigot the left and thirty-eight companies, including three companies each of light infantry and grenadiers, the 38th, 43rd, and 47th Regiments, and the 1st Marines. These units on the left were deployed in three lines just as Howe’s division was. All together the attacking British had 2200 rank and file, six field pieces, two light 12-pounders, and two howitzers.
