The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (63 page)

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.
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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 bespoke 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

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¹⁵
Ibid.,
91-92, 93-94. On all the matters discussed in this section, see Burnett,
Continental Congress
, 60-79.

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

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¹⁶
Ward, I, 73; Allen French,
The First Year of the American Revolution
( Boston and New York, 1934), 212-13.

¹⁷
Ward, I, 74-75 and 76-78, for the details about Putnam and Prescott.

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 fieldpieces 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 bill, 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.
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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,

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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 sent 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 sent 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