Independence (33 page)

Snippets of news about a second great battle had reached Philadelphia shortly before Washington’s departure. An express rider from the Bay Colony galloped into town at eleven o’clock on Wednesday night and headed directly for the boardinghouse where the Massachusetts delegation stayed. Despite the late hour, word spread quickly that something big must have occurred. In no time, more than a hundred men had gathered in the street, each straining to hear what was said. But the facts were “very Confused,” according to one man in the crowd. There had been a battle at Bunker Hill, just north of Boston. Losses were heavy on both sides. That was about all that was known for certain. Several New England congressmen rushed to their lodging to write home for more information. The sketchy account of the battle had provoked the “most uneasy of all Situations,” said one, while another wrote that the news “leaves us in suspence” and “the greatest possable anxiety.” “We wait to hear more particulars,” a congressman told a source near Boston, adding: “Our Hopes and Our Fears are alternately very strong.”
⁴⁴
The Battle of Bunker Hill would be profoundly important to both sides in this war, and it would have an impact on congressional decisions during the next couple of weeks.

Unaware of the steps being taken by Congress to create a national army and name its commander, General Ward had acted on his own to cope with military exigencies facing his siege army. Receiving intelligence that the British planned to occupy Charlestown Heights, hilly terrain across the Charles River from Boston, Ward moved swiftly to beat his adversary to the punch. On the night of June 16, the day after Washington’s appointment in faraway Philadelphia, Ward dispatched a sizable force to Bunker Hill with orders to fortify the site. Ward’s plan was simple. American artillery deployed on these heights could command Boston Harbor, the British army’s lifeline to the outside world. General Gage would face a choice of emerging to fight the entrenched rebels or of quitting Boston.

Just before dawn, Gage learned of Ward’s action. The British commander rapidly decided to fight. In fact, unable to imagine that America’s callow soldiers would stand up to his regulars, Gage scorned suggestions that the Royal Navy be utilized to simply seal off the rebels’ only escape route, giving the British a bloodless victory. Gage ordered a frontal assault. He hoped to humiliate the rebels, who he thought would flee when they saw the king’s soldiers advancing on their positions. Gage also hoped to kill as many colonial soldiers as possible. That would dampen the ardor of other colonists who were eager to take up arms. Gage was cocksure not just of victory but also of inflicting a disaster of such proportions on the Grand American Army that the colonists’ will to continue the rebellion would be broken.

Gage gave General William Howe, a veteran with a deserved reputation for bravery, responsibility for the attack. Howe never considered any option other than having his men fight as they were trained to fight on European battlefields. The regulars would march slowly and methodically up the open hillside toward their enemy. In Europe, opposing armies clashed on open battlefields. Howe knew things would be different here. His men would face an entrenched foe. But like Gage, Howe did not believe the Americans would stick around for the fight.

Howe was given 2,300 infantry. In addition, the navy was ordered to shell the nearby village of Charlestown, hoping to flush out any rebel units or snipers in that sector. Slightly more than 2,000 American soldiers were atop the hill, under the command of Colonel William Prescott. A lithe and trim six-footer, the forty-nine-year-old Prescott had soldiered in the past two intercolonial wars. He had so impressed his regular commanders during the French and Indian War that they had offered him a commission in the British army. He declined, and at war’s end returned to his farm in Pepperell, Massachusetts. Now he was soldiering again, and at Bunker Hill his men were armed with muskets and ten artillery pieces. The Yankee soldiers had precious little ammunition, but many were ensconced inside a hastily constructed four-sided, square redoubt. Others were hunched behind earthworks and stone walls.

The Battle of Bunker Hill occurred on June 17, 1775. The British armed forces succeeded in retaking the hill from the Grand American Army, but suffered heavy losses, which convinced many colonists that the untrained Americans could stand up to British regulars. (Archive of Early American Images, John Corter Brown Library, Brown University)

One aspect of Gage’s strategy unfolded as planned. The navy laid down a shuddering bombardment, setting Charlestown ablaze. The “merciless Dogs” reduced the little village to “a heap of Ruin with nothing standing but a heap of Chimneys,” one enraged Yankee reported.
⁴⁵
Otherwise, nothing went as Gage and Howe had imagined it would. Foremost among their disappointments was that the American soldiers did not immediately flee in panic. Ordered to husband their powder and not to fire “until you can see the whites of their eyes,” the Americans stood their ground, watching as the regulars marched unhurriedly, and unwaveringly, up the hillside. An eerie silence fell over the scene, broken only by the clatter of equipment as the redcoats struggled at times to climb over the fences and walls that dotted the landscape. With determination the regulars moved closer, steadily closer, in what many Americans later marveled was a “very slow march.”

When the regulars closed to within twenty-five yards, the Americans at last opened fire. It was akin to “a continual sheet of lightning” and sounded like “an uninterrupted peal of thunder,” one of Howe’s men thought. They “picked us all off,” he added.
⁴⁶
Men clad in red fell all across the battlefield. One who went down with a mortal wound was Major John Pitcairn, who two months earlier had commanded the regulars on Lexington Green. (He was allegedly struck only a second after shouting “The day is ours!”)
⁴⁷
That blood-drenched moment when scores of British regulars were gunned down produced “
a Moment that I never felt before
,” Howe acknowledged afterward.
⁴⁸
The British fell back, and “with a quicker step than they came up,” a Yankee noted with satisfaction.
⁴⁹

But the British came on again. The Americans continued to stand their ground. For a second time the regulars were repulsed. Howe summoned reinforcements from Boston. When the additional units were in place, he ordered his men forward a third time. This time the regulars succeeded, but only because the Americans finally ran out of ammunition. Without the means of fighting, the rebels at last broke and ran. The regulars, atop the heights, poured a merciless fire on the fleeing Yankees, killing many, including Dr. Warren, the rebel firebrand who unwisely had come to the battlefield to watch the fighting.

The carnage was nearly indescribable, and it was mostly suffered by the regulars. Fifty percent of the British soldiers who saw action were killed or wounded. Of the British officer corps stationed in Boston, 40 percent were casualties. Altogether, Gage and Howe lost 226 killed and 928 wounded, nearly a quarter of the British army in Boston. The Americans took heavy losses too. Some 330 rebels were killed or wounded.
⁵⁰

Four British generals had been present, and each was shocked and dismayed by what had taken place. After the battle, Howe walked among his wounded on the slopes of Bunker Hill, listening to their mournful cries, his white leggings laced with streaks of red by the tall, blood-drenched grass. On this “unhappy day,” he remarked, “success [was] too dearly bought.” Sir Henry Clinton called it a “dear bought victory,” and added that “another such would have ruined us.” General John Burgoyne, who had watched the engagement from Beacon Hill in Boston, described the battle as “a picture … of horrour.” Though a veteran of the fighting in Europe in Britain’s previous war with France, Burgoyne thought Bunker Hill had featured “the greatest scenes of war” he had ever witnessed.
⁵¹

It fell to Gage to file the official report with Lord Dartmouth. The general minced no words. British losses were “greater than our force can afford to lose.” Gage’s view of his adversary had been transformed. The “rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be.” They fight with “zeal and enthusiasm,” evincing “a military spirit” never displayed when they soldiered alongside the British in the French and Indian War. Gage closed with a warning: The “conquest of this Country is not easy, and can be affected only by time and perseverance, and strong armies attacking it in various quarters and dividing their forces.”
⁵²

By the end of June, Congress knew what had occurred and its members were exultant. Samuel Adams “greatly rejoiced at the tryed Valor” of the New England soldiers. A South Carolinian dared to believe that the British army might fear “to face the provincials again” after suffering “so severe a drubbing.” Jefferson said that “every one rejoices” at the news of Pitcairn’s death. When writing to friends in England, Franklin emphasized the “two severe Repulses” suffered by the British army. But with a wink and a nod he skipped over the rebels’ shortage of powder, claiming instead that the redcoats finally succeeded only because the Americans had lacked the time to complete their entrenchments.
⁵³

Word of Bunker Hill almost immediately influenced a matter before Congress. In May, Congress had stopped Colonel Benedict Arnold in his tracks when he was poised to advance from Crown Point into Canada. But in early June, after Arnold reported that the British authorities in Canada were inciting the Indians to attack along New York’s northern frontier, the question of an American invasion of Canada had resurfaced. New York and New England supported such an action, but the other colonies were uncertain. Congress waffled for days before agreeing to postpone a decision until it learned whether the inhabitants of Canada, for the most part people of French descent, were likely to assist an American invasion force. Congress was still waiting for an answer when the news of Bunker Hill arrived. One day later Congress decided on “making an Impression into Canada,” as Hancock curiously worded his missive that broke the news to General Washington. Given the Americans’ performance along Battle Road and on Bunker Hill, Congress thought that Canada, which was weakly defended by the British, would fall whether or not the Canadian population provided assistance.
⁵⁴

Canada was not the only item on Congress’s agenda when word of Bunker Hill arrived. Late in May, Congress had referred to a committee the North Peace Plan, the prime minister’s wishful pitch for reconciliation based on the fatuous notion of permitting each colonial assembly to raise whatever amount of revenue was stipulated by Parliament. Calling it an “example of the moderation of Parliament,” and praying that it would bring an end to the colonists’ “trivial and groundless complaints,” Dartmouth had sent the plan to each governor, directing them to submit it to their assemblies for approval. Dartmouth ignored the Continental Congress.
⁵⁵

Ten days before the Second Congress met, the Pennsylvania assembly had been the first to take up North’s plan. Still meeting in the room that Congress would soon take for its own, the Pennsylvania legislature—in a carefully worded message written by Dickinson—told the governor that it would be “a dishonorable desertion of sister colonies … for a Single Colony to adopt a measure so extensive in consequences.” It forwarded North’s plan to Congress, as did every colonial assembly that considered the scheme, though some spoke out harshly on the so-called peace plan. Virginia’s House of Burgesses adopted one of the stronger statements, a resolution penned by Thomas Jefferson. North’s ploy of levying quotas was “a stile of asking gifts not reconcilable to our freedom,” Jefferson had written. He added that “the British Parliament has no right to intermeddle with … civil government in the Colonies.”
⁵⁶

By the time Congress finally got around to North’s plan, Jefferson had been added to the Virginia delegation in Philadelphia. When Congress turned to him in July to draft its resolution on North’s proposal, it was clear that every member held the prime minister’s scheme in contempt. Maryland’s Thomas Johnson doubtless spoke for all his colleagues when he remarked that “Lord North’s proposition” was “insidiously devised to wear the face of peace,” although in reality it was a “villainous” move designed to “Embarrass us in the Choice of evils.” Jefferson’s draft rejecting North’s plan was even more hostile than the document he had written for Virginia. This time Jefferson labeled North’s plan “uncandid[,] unreasonable[,] unequal[,] and insidious.” Congress toned down his rhetoric a mite. It styled North’s plan merely “unreasonable and insidious.”
⁵⁷