“When once these rebels have felt a smart blow,” George told
his Admiralty, “they will submit.”
Blows would decide, as the king had predicted. Yet no one
could foresee that the American War of Independence would last 3,059 days. Or
that the struggle would be marked by more than 1,300 actions, mostly small and
bloody, with a few large and bloody, plus 241 naval engagements in a theater
initially bounded by the Atlantic seaboard, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi
Rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico, before expanding to other lands and other
waters.
Roughly a quarter million Americans would serve the cause in
some military capacity. At least one in ten of them would die for that cause-
25,674 deaths by one tally, as many as 35,800 by another. Those deaths were
divided with rough parity among battle, disease, and British prisons, a larger
proportion of the American population to perish in any conflict other than the
Civil War. If many considered the war providential-ordained by God’s will and
shaped by divine grace-certainly the outcome would also be determined by gutful
soldiering, endurance, hard decisions (good and bad), and luck (good and bad).
The odds were heavily stacked against the Americans: no colonial rebellion had
ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. But, as Voltaire had observed,
history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden
shoes coming up.
This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought
for territory or the usual commercial advantages. Instead, what became known as
the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a
common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a
world to come. Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one
would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with
reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the
age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war,
would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and
atrocity.
Those 3,059 hard days would yield two tectonic results. The
first was in the United Kingdom, where the reduction of the empire by about
one-third, including the demolition of the new dominions in North America,
proved to be as divisive as any misfortune to befall the nation in the
eighteenth century, at a cost of £128 million and thousands of British lives.
The broader conflict that began in 1778, with the intervention of European
powers on America’s behalf, led to the only British defeat in the seven
Anglo-French wars fought between 1689 and 1815. Of course, what was lost by
force of arms could be regained, and a second British Empire, in different
garb, would flourish in the next century.
The second consequence was epochal and enduring: the
creation of the American republic. Surely among mankind’s most remarkable achievements,
this majestic construct also inspired a creation myth that sometimes resembled a
garish cartoon, a melodramatic tale of doughty yeomen resisting moronic, brutal
lobsterbacks. The civil war that unspooled over those eight years would be both
grander and more nuanced, a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and
blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Beyond the battlefield, then and
forever, stood a shining city on a hill.
#
Lieutenant General Thomas Gage declared martial law on June
12 with a long, windy denunciation of “the infatuated multitudes.” He
offered to pardon those who “lay down their arms and return to the duties
of peaceable subjects,” exclusive of Samuel Adams and John Hancock,
“whose offenses are of too flagitious a nature” to forgive. He ended
the screed with “God save the King.”
The same day, Gage wrote to Lord Barrington, the secretary
at war, that “things are now come to that crisis that we must avail
ourselves of every resource, even to raise the Negroes in our cause.. Hanoverians,
Hessians, perhaps Russians may be hired.” To Lord Dartmouth he warned that
he was critically low on both cash-he could not pay his officers-and forage;
ships had been sent to Nova Scotia and Quebec seeking hay and oats. Crushing
the rebellion, he estimated, would require more frigates and at least 32,000
soldiers, including 10,000 in New York, 7,000 around Lake Champlain, and 15,000
in New England. Another officer writing from Boston on June 12 advised London-the
king himself received a copy-that the rebel blockade “is judicious &
strong.” As for British operations, “all warlike preparations are
wanting. No survey of the adjacent country, no proper boats for landing troops,
not a sufficient number of horses for the artillery nor for the regimental
baggage.” The war chest had “about three or four thousand [pounds]
only remaining.. The rebellious colonies will supply nothing.”
Gage’s adjutant complained that “every idle report is
carried to headquarters and . magnified to such a degree that rebels are seen
in the air carrying cannon and mortars on their shoulders.” Some regulars
longed for a decisive battle; “taking the bull by the horns” became
an oft-heard phrase in the regiments. “I wish the Americans may be brought
to a sense of their duty,” an officer wrote in mid-June. “One good
drubbing, which I long to give them. might have a good effect.” As Captain
Evelyn told his cousin in London, “If there is an honor in hard knocks, we
are likely to have some share.”
The imminent arrival of transports with light dragoons, more
marines, and several foot regiments would bring the British garrison to over
six thousand troops, not enough to subdue Massachusetts, much less the
continent, but sufficient, as Gage told London, to “make an attempt upon
some of the rebel posts, which becomes every day more necessary.” Two
alluring patches of high ground remained unfortified, and Gage knew from an
informant that American commanders coveted the same slopes: the elevation
beyond Boston Neck known as the Dorchester Heights, and the dominant terrain
above Charlestown called Bunker, or Bunker’s Hill. A battle plan was made to
seize the former on Sunday, June 18, with a bombardment of Roxbury while the
rebels were at church, followed by the construction of two artillery redoubts
on the heights. If all went well, regulars could then capture the high ground
on Charlestown peninsula and eventually attack the American encampment at
Cambridge.
#
No sooner was the plan conceived than it leaked to the
Committee of Safety; British officers seemed incapable of keeping their mouths
shut in a town full of American spies and eavesdroppers. Intelligence even came
from New Hampshire, where a traveler out of Boston told authorities there about
rumors of an imminent British sally. Meeting in Hastings House, a gambrel-roofed
mansion near the Cambridge Common, the committee on June 15 voted unanimously
that “the hill called Bunker’s Hill in Charlestown be securely kept and
defended.” Dorchester Heights would have to wait until more guns and powder
could be stockpiled.
The American camps bustled. Arms and ammunition were
inspected, with each marching soldier to carry thirty rounds. A note to the
Committee of Supply advised that “the army is destitute of shirts &
trousers, and if any [are] in store, pray they may be sent.” Liquor sales
stopped, again. Teamsters carted the books and scientific instruments from
Harvard’s library to Andover for safekeeping. Organ pipes were yanked from the
Anglican church and melted down for musket bullets. An ordnance storehouse
issued all forty-eight shovels in stock as well as ammunition to selected
regiments-typically forty or fifty pounds of powder, a thousand balls, and a
few hundred flints. Commissaries in Cambridge and Roxbury reported that
provisions arriving through June 16 included 1,869 loaves of bread and 357
gallons of milk from Cambridge vendors, 60 pairs of shoes from Milton, 1,570
pounds of beef and 40 barrels of beer from Watertown, a ton of candles, 1,500
pounds of soap, several hundred barrels of beans, peas, flour, and salt fish by
the quintal, rum by the hogshead, and a few hundred tents, many without poles.
All Massachusetts men within twenty miles of the coast were urged to carry
their firelocks “to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they meet
for public worship.” A sergeant from Wethersfield wrote his wife,
“We’ve been in a great deal of hubbub.”
Orders spilled from the headquarters of Major General Ward,
who occupied a southeast room on the Hastings House ground floor. Portly and
sallow, sporting a powdered wig, boots, and a long coat with silver buttons,
Artemas Ward, now forty-seven, had been chosen in February to command the
Massachusetts militia on the strength of his long tenure in colonial politics.
As a Harvard student, he once helped lead a campaign against “swearing and
cursing” at the college; as a justice of the peace in Shrewsbury, he’d
levied fines against the profane and could be found in the street reprimanding
those who dishonored the Sabbath with unnecessary travel. Massachusetts, he
believed, was home to the Chosen People. Ward had never fully recovered his
health after the rigors of the French war, from which he’d emerged as a militia
lieutenant colonel despite seeing little action. “Attacks of the
stone”-kidney stones-still tormented him. Pious, honest, and devoted to
the patriot cause, he was also taciturn, torpid, and stubborn. The gambit to
hold Bunker Hill in Charlestown that he and the Committee of Safety had
concocted was an impulse, not a plan. The rebel force lacked not only
sufficient ammunition and field artillery but also combat reserves, a coherent
chain of command, and even water. Ward had recently requested from the
provincial congress almost sixty guns, fifteen hundred muskets, twenty tons of
powder, and a similar quantity of lead; few of those munitions had been
forthcoming.
Shortly after six p. m. on Friday, June 16, three
Massachusetts regiments drifted through the arching elms and onto the Cambridge
Common. They wore the usual homespun linen shirts and breeches tinted with
walnut or sumac dye. Most carried a blanket or bedroll, often with a tumpline
strap across the forehead to support the weight on their backs. A clergyman’s
benediction droned over their bowed heads, and with a final amen they replaced
their low-crowned hats and turned east down the Charlestown road.
Twilight faded and was gone, and the last birdsong faded
with it. The first stars threw down their silver spears. Little rain had fallen
in the past month, and dust boiled beneath each step. Candlelight gleamed from
the rear of two bull’s-eye lanterns carried by sergeants at the head of the
column. Officers commanded silence, and only the rattle of carts stacked with
entrenching tools broke the quiet. Through parched orchards and across Willis
Creek they marched, and past the hulking shadows of Prospect and Winter Hills.
As they turned right toward Charlestown, a couple hundred Connecticut troops
joined the column, bringing their strength to a thousand men.
General Ward had remained in his Hastings House
headquarters, and the column was led by a sinewy, azure-eyed colonel wearing a
blue coat with a single row of buttons and a tricorne hat. He carried a linen
banyan. William Prescott of Pepperell, forty-nine and bookish, had fought twice
in Canada during wars against the French, earning a reputation for cool
self-possession under fire. In this war he reportedly had vowed never to be
taken alive. “He was a bold man,” one soldier later wrote of him,
“and gave his orders like a bold man.”
Bold orders this evening would prove to be ill-considered. As
the procession crossed Charlestown Neck-barely ten yards wide at high tide-
Prescott briefly conferred with the irrepressible Israel Putnam and Colonel
Richard Gridley, an artilleryman and engineer who had also fought twice in
Canada with distinction. From just below the isthmus, the three officers
contemplated the dark contours of Charlestown peninsula, an irregular triangle
a mile long and less than half that in width, bracketed by the Mystic and Charles
Rivers. Even at night the dominant terrain was obvious: Bunker Hill rose
gradually from the Neck for three hundred yards to a rounded crown 110 feet
high, commanding not only the single land route off the peninsula, but the
approach roads from Cambridge and Medford, as well as the adjacent waters. From
the crest a low ridge swept southeast another six hundred yards to the
patchwork of pastures, seventy-five feet high and sutured with rail fences,
that would be called Breed’s Hill. Some fields had been scythed, the grass laid
in windrows and cocks; in others it still stood waist-high. Brick kilns and
clay pits pocked the steep eastern slope of the Breed’s pastures. Gardens and
small orchards lay scattered to the west, backing the four hundred houses, shops,
and buildings in Charlestown. Most of the three thousand residents had fled
inland. The rising moon, three days past full, laved the town in amber light.
Beyond the ferry landing and a spiny-masted warship in the Charles lay
slumbering Boston.
For reasons never explained and certainly never understood,
when the conference ended Prescott ordered the column to continue southeast.
Colonel Gridley quickly staked out a redoubt-an imperfect square with sides
about 130 feet long-not on nearly impregnable Bunker Hill, as the Committee of
Safety had specified, but on the southwest slope of Breed’s pastureland.
Accustomed to pick-and-shovel work, the men grabbed tools from the carts and
began hacking at the hillside. Striking clocks in Boston, echoed at higher pitch
by a ship’s bell, told them it was midnight.
#
The rhythmic chink of metal on hard ground carried to the
Lively, another of those leaky vessels in the British squadron, now anchored
astride the Charlestown ferryway. As coral light seeped across the eastern
horizon at four a. m. on Saturday, June 17, the graveyard watch officer
strained to decipher the odd sounds above the groan of the ship’s yards and the
Charles whispering along her hull. He summoned the captain, whose spyglass soon
showed hundreds of tiny dark figures tearing at the distant slope with spade and
mattock.
The ship beat to quarters. Sailors tumbled from their
hammocks, feet clapping across the deck as they ran to their battle stations. A
windlass groaned as the crew winched Lively on her cable to align the starboard
cannons. A shouted command carried across the gun deck, and tongues of flame
burst from the ship in a broadside of 9-pounders. Breeching ropes kept the guns
from flying across the deck in recoil; block and tackle ran them forward for
the next salvo. Gunners swabbed the smoking barrels, rammed home powder and
shot, and another flock of iron balls flew toward Breed’s Hill. Other ships
eventually joined in-Glasgow, Symmetry, Falcon, Spitfire, more than seventy
guns all told-along with 24-pounders from the Copp’s Hill battery in Boston’s North
End.
Dawn, that great revealer of predicaments, had fully
disclosed Colonel Prescott’s. Screaming cannonballs-“tea kettles,” in
rebel slang-streaked overhead or punched into the hillside, smashing two
hogsheads containing the American water supply. “The danger we were in
made us think there was treachery, & that we were brought here to be all
slain,” young Peter Brown would write his mother in Rhode Island. Distance
and elevation reduced the bombardment’s effect, although Prescott recounted how
one militiaman whose head abruptly vanished in a crimson mist “was so near
me that my clothes were besmeared with his blood and brains, which I wiped off
in some degree with a handful of fresh earth.” When other men dropped
their tools to gawk at the corpse, Prescott snapped, “Bury him,” then
strolled off with conspicuous nonchalance, hatless now, waggling his sword and
urging the men to dig faster.
The redoubt taking shape was formidable enough, with thick
dirt walls six feet high, fire steps for musketmen inside to stand on, and a
sally port exit to the north. But no embrasures had been left for cannons;
worse yet, Prescott recognized that the British could outflank him on either
side. Gage’s men would no doubt attack in force across the Charles, seeking to
stun the defenders with firepower before closing to complete the slaughter with
bayonets. To protect his left flank, Prescott ordered the men to begin building
a low breastwork northeast from the sally port to marshy ground at the foot of
Breed’s Hill.
He also sent an officer to plead for reinforcements,
provisions, and water. Artillerymen refused to lend the courier a horse,
forcing him to walk four miles to Cambridge, which he found “quiet as the
Sabbath.” At Hastings House he discovered Dr. Warren, newly appointed as a
major general despite his lack of military experience, splayed on an upstairs
bed with a crippling headache. General Ward, tormented with another attack of
the stone, fretted over the vulnerability of Roxbury, the Dorchester Heights,
and his Cambridge supply dumps; British gunfire had been reported at Boston
Neck. Not least, Ward worried that only twenty-seven half-barrels of powder
remained in his magazines, perhaps enough for forty thousand cartridges. With
consent from the Committee of Safety, he reluctantly agreed to send
reinforcements to Prescott from the New Hampshire militia camped along the
Mystic.
#
The deep boom of Lively’s broadsides had wakened General
Gage, as it woke all of Boston. Province House, aglitter in candlelight, soon
bustled with red uniforms. Messengers skipped up the broad stone steps from
Marlborough Street with news of rebel entrenchments, then skipped back down
with orders to find and fetch various commanders. Young officers eager to join
the coming attack loitered in the hallway, hoping to be noticed. Sleepy aides
fumbled about for decent maps, of which the British still had precious few.
Concussion ghosts from the harbor bombardment rattled the windows, and the rap
of drums beating assembly carried from the camps.
Several senior officers joined Gage in the council chamber,
including Percy, who arrived from his house in nearby Winter Street. But it was
three newcomers who drew the eye this morning: Major Generals William Howe,
John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton had reached Boston in late May aboard the
Cerberus, after a stormy voyage that killed two favorite horses but gave the
three men ample time to find common ground for the campaign ahead despite their
inevitable rivalry. “The sentiments of Howe, Clinton, and myself have been
unanimous from the beginning,” Burgoyne declared. The king had personally
approved their selection, fearing that without vigorous new leadership in
America “we shall only vegetate.” They were deemed “the fittest
men for the service in the army,” as one official in London observed,
forming what Burgoyne called “a triumvirate of reputation.”
Others were not so sure. Horace Walpole, ever astringent,
told his diary that Howe “was reckoned sensible, though so silent that
nobody knew whether he was or not,” while Burgoyne was “a vain, very
ambitious man, with a half understanding that was worse than none.”
Clinton, he declared, “had not that fault, for he had no sense at
all.” Their arrival at Long Wharf aboard a frigate named for the mythical
three-headed hound guarding the gates of Hades inspired the war’s most enduring
doggerel: “Behold the Cerberus, the Atlantic plough, / Her precious cargo,
Burgoyne, Clinton, Howe, / Bow, wow, wow!” Thereafter known as the three
bow-wows, they had wasted little time in undercutting Gage’s authority, as in
Burgoyne’s barbed observation to General Harvey earlier that week that it was
“no reflection to say he is unequal to his present station, for few
characters in the world would be fit for it.. It requires a genius of the very
first class.”
As the windows trembled and the Old South clock across the
street struck the hours, the high command, genius or otherwise, heatedly
debated what to do. General Clinton, a dimple-chinned, prickly, and gifted
tactician, proposed the boldest course. Early that morning, he had made his own
reconnaissance in the dark along the Boston waterfront, listening to the racket
from the rebel entrenchment. If Howe and the main British force crossed
directly from the North End to Charlestown, Clinton would lead five hundred men
ashore in a surprise flanking attack within musket shot of the isthmus,
severing the American line of retreat and trapping the enemy on the peninsula.
This scheme found little favor around Gage’s council table.
Dividing the force would risk defeat in detail of the separate detachments,
particularly if thousands of rebel reinforcements stormed the battlefield from
Cambridge. Naval support would be tenuous: even shallow-draft vessels had
difficulty in the Mystic, which had not been thoroughly sounded, and a milldam
west of Charlestown Neck complicated navigation there. No one had forgotten
Diana’s fate in shoal water. Every small boat would be needed to ferry at least
fifteen hundred regulars from Boston to Morton’s Point on the peninsula. The
amphibious assault would have to be made at “full sea”-high tide,
close to three p. m.-so that artillery could be manhandled onto dry land rather
than through the muddy shallows.
Gage chose a more conventional, direct assault to be led by
Howe, the senior major general. As in the march to Concord, most flanker
companies- light infantry and grenadiers-had been peeled from their regiments
and collected in special battalions. Ten companies of each would muster at Long
Wharf, bolstered by several other regiments. The remaining light infantry and
grenadiers, backed by additional regiments, would embark at North Battery, with
sundry marines and regulars in reserve.
Gage ended the conference with a stark order: “Any man
who shall quit his ranks on any pretense, or shall dare to plunder or pillage,
will be executed without mercy.” With a clatter of boots across the floor,
officers hurried down the hall and out the door to prepare their commands for
battle.
Admiral Graves, meanwhile, had left his flagship to board
the seventy-gun Somerset, now anchored in deep water across Boston Harbor. From
her gently rocking quarterdeck he could see rebels swarming across the
Charlestown hillside around the new earthworks; many were already
“entrenched to their chins,” as a British officer noted. Men-of-war
belched smoke and noise, and tiny black cannonballs traced perfect parabolas
against the summer sky, plumping the fields and splintering tree branches without
excessive inconvenience to the Jonathans building their forts. To Graves’s
frustration, the waters lapping Charlestown were too shallow for Somerset and
other dreadnoughts to warp close; his larger ships would be limited to sending
seamen, ammunition, and boats to their smaller sisters.
#
As the morning ticked by, Glasgow and Symmetry hammered
Charlestown Neck from an anchorage west of the peninsula, supported by a pair
of scows, each mounting a 12-pounder. But the ebbing tide kept them from nosing
near the milldam, and Graves regretted his failure to build more floating batteries
and gun rafts. Lively, Falcon, and little Spitfire glided into the Charlestown
channel, popping away while preparing to cover Howe’s landing. The roar of the
cannonade carried to Cambridge, Roxbury, and other villages; one terrified
minister’s wife draped blankets over her windows in hopes of deflecting stray
bullets.
Shortly before noon, as meridian heat began to build in
Boston, long columns of regulars tramped to fife and drum through the town’s
cobbled streets from the Common to the docks. Each man carried, as ordered,
sixty rounds, a day’s cooked provisions, and a blanket. The 52nd Foot had been
issued gleaming new muskets and bayonets that very morning; they would soon
grow filthy with use. By chance, a portion of the 49th Foot had just arrived
after a long passage from southern Ireland. Wide-eyed privates, wobbly on their
pins after weeks at sea, disembarked on Long Wharf and marched toward the
Common with flags flying and drums beating even as the grenadier and light
infantry companies from other regiments clambered into the bobbing boats at
Long Wharf for the first lift to Charlestown.
At one-thirty p. m., a blue pennant appeared on Preston’s
signal halyard. Twenty-eight yawls, longboats, cutters, and ketches carrying
twelve hundred soldiers pulled away from Long Wharf in a double column, oars
winking in syncopation, with a half dozen brass field guns nestled into the
lead boats. The cannonade from the ships had ebbed, but now it grew heavier
than ever, balls flying, smoke billowing, and the din reverberating like a
terrible thunder. Thousands crowded Boston’s rooftops and hillsides, perching
on tree boughs and clinging to steeples. Among the spectators were regulars
left behind and the wives of troops now gliding across the Charles. Loyalists and
patriots stood together, aware that sons and fathers and lovers were down there
somewhere in harm’s way, on the glinting water or the distant hillside.
Here again was an ancient, squalid secret: that war was an
enchantment, a sorcery, a seductive spectacle like no other, beguiling the eye
and gorging the senses. They looked because they could not look away. Atop
Bunker Hill, a Connecticut chaplain named David Avery watched the sculling
boats approach Morton’s Point, then raised both arms to heaven before asking
God’s indulgence on “a scene most awful and tremendous.”
#
Astride a lathered white horse, his own halo of tangled
white hair instantly recognizable, General Israel Putnam trotted back and forth
across the American line in a sleeveless waistcoat, smacking shirkers with the
flat of his sword. To an officer pleading with a reluctant militiaman, Putnam
snapped, “Run him through if he won’t fight.” One captain would later
reflect that Old Put resembled not a field commander so much as the foreman of
“a band of sicklemen or ditchers.. He might be brave, and had certainly an
honest manliness about him; but it was thought, and perhaps with reason, that
he was not what the time required.”
Nine Massachusetts regiments had been ordered to Charlestown
from Cambridge, but at best only five had reached the peninsula; the others
were delayed, misdirected, or misinformed. No one seemed to have a map. Roads
were confusing, the terrain foreign. Troop discipline was “extremely
irregular,” one officer wrote, “each regiment advancing according to
the opinions, feelings, or caprice of its commander.” Putnam had ordered
entrenching tools carried back from the redoubt to belatedly build a
fortification on Bunker Hill; eager volunteers grabbed a shovel or an ax, then
retreated toward the Neck and beyond, never to return. By one count, fewer than
170 men remained with Prescott to hold his redoubt, officers included. “To
be plain,” an observer would write Samuel Adams, “it appears to me
there never was more confusion and less command.”
Happily for the American cause, some men knew their
business. Colonel Prescott continued to improve his imperfect fort and the
adjacent breastwork, positioning men and shouting encouragement. Roughly two
hundred yards behind the breastwork, a tall, enterprising captain from eastern
Connecticut, Thomas Knowlton, recognized the defensive potential of a rail
livestock fence that extended northeast for several hundred yards, from the
middle of the peninsula almost to the Mystic. The fence had been laid on a
slight zigzag course and assembled with a method known as stake-and-rider; a
portion of it straddled a two-foot stone wall. Two hundred men helped Captain
Knowlton reinforce the southwestern length of the barrier with additional rails
and posts scavenged from other fields. They then stuffed the gaps with haycocks
and sheaves of cut grass to give the illusion of a solid parapet. Several small
field guns hauled by horses from Cambridge were emplaced nearby.
As the British boats beat from Boston, the most critical
rebel reinforcements reached Charlestown Neck to the thrum of fife and drum:
hundreds of long-striding New Hampshire militiamen, described as a “moving
column of uncouth figures clad in homespun.” Millers, mariners, and
husbandmen, they included the largest regiment in New England, commanded by
Colonel John Stark, the lean, beetle-browed son of a Scottish emigrant. Stark’s
picaresque life had included capture by Indians while hunting in 1752 and his
release six weeks later for a hefty ransom. As a Ranger officer in the last
French war, he had plodded more than forty miles in snowshoes to fetch help for
comrades wounded in an ambush. After surviving the bloody Anglo-American
repulse by the French at Fort Carillon in 1758, he and two hundred men
subsequently built an eighty-mile road from Crown Point to the Connecticut
valley. Upon hearing the news of Lexington, Stark, now forty-six, left his
sawmill and his wife, pregnant with their ninth child, and was elected colonel
by a unanimous show of hands in a tavern; so many men rallied to him that
thirteen companies filled his regiment. At eleven this morning, General Ward’s
initial order to reinforce Charlestown reached Stark’s camp in Medford, four
miles up the Mystic. As he would tell the New Hampshire Provincial Congress a
few days later, “The battle soon came on.”
Stark sent an advance detachment of two hundred men to the
peninsula, then tarried long enough at a house converted into an armory for the
rest of his force to draw ammunition: fifteen balls, a flint, and a gill cup of
powder-five ounces-for each musketman. Crossing the narrow isthmus shortly
after two p. m., harassed with round, bar, and chain shot from Royal Navy guns,
the Hampshiremen ascended Bunker Hill at a deliberate pace, then descended to
the northeast lip of the peninsula. “One fresh man in action,” Stark
told a captain, “is worth ten fatigued ones.” A quick glance
disclosed the American peril: despite Knowlton’s deft work along the rail
fence, and the hasty construction of three small triangular earthworks known as
fleches closer to the redoubt, Prescott’s position could still be outflanked by
redcoats advancing up the Mystic shoreline. To block the narrow, muddy beach,
Stark’s men scooted down the eight-foot riverbank and quickly stacked
fieldstones to build a short, stout wall. Most Hampshiremen took positions
behind the fence to extend Knowlton’s line, further stuffing it with hay,
grass, and stray rails. But sixty musketmen arranged themselves on the beach in
a triple row behind the new barricade. There they awaited their enemy.
