By the time of the American Revolution, Britain’s .75 calibre Land Pattern Musket head earned the unofficial nickname of “Brown Bess.” Even the 18th century Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue described the popular expression “to hug Brown Bess,” as slang for enlisting in the army.
Thick-featured and taciturn, General Howe in the best of
times was said to be afflicted by a “sullen family gloom.” He, too,
needed but a glance to see his own dilemma. Landing at Morton’s Point with the
second lift of six hundred infantry and artillery troops from North Battery,
Howe climbed a nearby hillock as gunners shouldered their fieldpieces onto dry
ground and the empty boats rowed back to Boston. “It was instantly
perceived the enemy were very strongly posted,” he subsequently told London.
On his far left, rebel gunmen infested rooftops and barns in
Charlestown, while up the pasture slopes, five hundred yards from where Howe
stood watching with his command group, a large bastion had sprouted from the
hillside. The rest of the rebel defenses came into view: the triangular
fleches, several guns throwing an occasional ball inaccurately toward the
British lines, and the long fence-or was it a wall?-bristling with men stripped
to their shirtsleeves. The fields and pastures ended in a short plunge down to
the Mystic shoreline. With more rebels clustered atop Bunker Hill and spilling
across Charlestown Neck despite the naval gunfire, Howe calculated that he
faced “between five and six thousand” Americans-half again their
actual number. He sent a courier flying to Province House with a request that
Gage send reinforcements immediately; the attack would await their arrival.
Redcoats poised to march near Morton’s Point broke ranks, grounded their
muskets, and sat in the grass to smoke their pipes or gobble a quick dinner of
bread and salt meat.
Howe made his plan. The Mystic beach seemed a promising
corridor from which to outflank and turn the rebel line. On foot, the general
would personally lead the British right wing, including grenadiers assaulting
the rail fence while a column of light infantry companies slashed up that river
shoreline. The left wing, led by the diminutive, moonfaced Brigadier Robert
Pigot, would attack the redoubt to fix the enemy in place and maybe even
overrun the parapet once Howe’s troops had broken through. Celebrated for his
sangfroid against the French at Quebec, the Breton coast, and Havana, Howe was
quoted as telling his officers, “I shall not desire one of you to go a
step farther than where I go myself at your head.” Speed, agility,
discipline, and violence would be decisive. Losing Boston, he reminded them,
meant moving the entire army onto Graves’s ships, “which will be very
disagreeable to us all.”
Including the reserves soon to arrive, Howe commanded more
than twenty-six hundred men. British field guns began popping away at three p.
m., “great nasty porridge pots flying through the air & crammed as
full of devils as they could hold,” as a young militiaman wrote, each ball
“whispering along with its blue tail.” The bombardment so unnerved
the rebel artillery battery up the slope that one American gun captain
reportedly “fired a few times, then swung his hat three times round to the
enemy and ceased to fire.” Regulars tamped out their pipes and shouldered
their muskets, bayonets fixed. Junior officers bawled out orders. Ten companies
abreast would form a broad assault front on Pigot’s wing to the left, followed
by ten more, a formation mirrored by Howe’s right wing except for the light
infantry column along the Mystic, necessarily squeezed into a
shoulder-to-shoulder front between river and riverbank.
On order, the great mass of redcoats heaved forward with a
clatter of equipment and more bawling commands, the slate-blue Charles behind
them and tawny dust clouds churning up with each stride. “Push on!”
the troops yelled. “Push on!” Drummers rapped a march cadence,
periodically punctuated by the boom of field guns towed forward with drag
ropes. Howe marched with the deliberation of a man who had done this before,
his eyes on the hillside ahead, trailed by aides, staff officers, and an
orderly said to have carried a silver tray with a decanter of wine. Watching
from the redoubt as this red tide advanced, Captain Ebenezer Bancroft of
Dunstable, Massachusetts, would give voice to every patriot on the battlefield:
“It was an awful moment.”
The moment grew more awful. For two months, Admiral Graves
had longed to rain destruction on rebel heads, and while Howe drafted his plan
on Morton’s Point, the admiral arrived by barge to note the hazard that enemy
snipers in Charlestown posed to Pigot’s left flank. Did General Howe wish
“to have the place burned?” Graves asked. As a precaution, brick
furnaces aboard several warships had prepared all morning to heat cannonballs.
General Howe indeed wished it so. A midshipman hurried to relay the order, and
fiery balls soon fell on Charlestown like tiny meteors. Worse destruction came
from Copp’s Hill in the North End, where early Boston settlers had once sought
refuge from the “great annoyances of Woolves, Rattle-snakes, and
Musketos.” British troops had muscled mortars and several mammoth
24-pounders to the edge of the ancient burying ground at Snow and Hill Streets,
sixty feet above the Charles. While Generals Clinton and Burgoyne watched,
gunners loaded combustible shells known as carcasses, each packed with
gunpowder, Swedish pitch, saltpeter, and tallow. The Charlestown meetinghouse,
with its slender, towering steeple, provided a conspicuous aiming stake.
The first shell fell short, bursting near the ferry slip.
Gunners corrected their elevation, and within minutes “the whole was
instantly in flames,” Burgoyne would write. Fire loped through
Charlestown’s streets like a thing alive, igniting buildings at the foot of
Chestnut Street and around Mauldin’s shipyard. Other structures along the docks
followed in quick succession: distilleries, a tannery, warehouses, shipwrights,
a cooperage. Fire climbed the pitched roofs-a “grand and melancholy
sight,” one loyalist observed-then licked through houses away from the
waterfront and up to the marketplace, incinerating the courthouse and the Three
Cranes Tavern. North of the market, on Town Hill, more houses and another
distillery caught fire. The light breeze shifted from southwest to east, as it
often did on fine summer days, and flames drove lengthwise through Charlestown.
Fire ignited more wharves and a ship chandlery. Ebony smoke rose in a column as
wide as the town, then “hung like a thunder cloud over the contending
armies,” an American officer reported. Rebel musketmen scurried from the
burning buildings to hide behind stone walls on Breed’s Hill and in a nearby
barn.
“The church steeples, being made of timber, were great
pyramids of fire above the rest,” wrote Burgoyne, who had a way with
words. “The roar of cannon, mortars, musketry, the crash of churches,
ships upon the stocks, the whole streets falling together in ruin, to fill the
ear.” All in all, the conflagration was “one of the greatest scenes
of war that can be conceived.”
Gawkers and gapers now climbed not only Boston rooftops and
hillsides, but “the masts of such ships as were unemployed in the harbor,
all crowded with spectators, friends and foes, alike in anxious suspense. It
was great, it was high-spirited.”
They, too, looked because they could not look away.
#
The rebels waited, now killing mad. At four p. m., well over
two thousand regulars ascended the slope in two distinct corps. Swallows
swooped above the hills, and the stench of a cremated town filled the nose.
Many militiamen had loaded “buck and ball”-a lead bullet and two or
three buckshot, known as “Yankee peas.” “Fire low,”
officers told the men. “Aim at their waistbands.” Again noting the
brighter tint of the British officers’ tunics-vibrant from more expensive
dyes-they added, “Aim at the handsome coats. Pick off the
commanders.” In the redoubt, Prescott angrily waved his sword to rebuke
several musketmen who were firing at impossible ranges; they were to wait until
the enemy was danger close, within six rods or so-a hundred feet. “Aim at
their hips,” Prescott ordered. “Waste no powder.” Five hundred
yards to the north, at the far end of the rail fence, Stark told his men to
hang fire until they could see the regulars’ half-gaiters below their knees.
Someone may also have urged waiting till the whites of the enemy’s eyes were
visible, an order that had been issued to Austrians, Prussians, and possibly
other warring armies earlier in the century.
Howe’s corps, on the British right, found marching through
the thigh-high grass difficult: fence after damnable fence forced the lines to
stop and dismantle the rails or climb over them. As planned, light infantrymen
angled through a shallow dell that led to the Mystic beach, now screened from
the broader battlefield by the riverbank. Eleven companies with more than three
hundred men funneled into a tight column, four or five men abreast. Beyond a
slight curve in the shoreline stood the newly built fieldstone wall, defended
by a few dozen rebel musketmen, some kneeling with their gun barrels resting on
the stones. Closing at a dog trot to within fifty yards, redcoats from the 23rd
Royal Welch Fusiliers in the vanguard of the column lowered their bayonets and
prepared to charge.
A stupendous, searing volley ripped into the British ranks,
blowing the fusiliers from their feet. Gunsmoke rolled down a beach upholstered
with dying regulars as their comrades stepped over them only to also be shot
down. With a third of the Welch Fusiliers wounded, mortally or otherwise, the
King’s Own Light Infantry behind them surged forward; they, too, were
slaughtered, followed by the 10th Foot, the 52nd Foot, and other light
companies trailing them. “It was like pushing a wax candle against a
red-hot plate,” the historian Christopher Ward would write. “The head
of the column simply melted away.” A man five feet, eight inches tall and
weighing 168 pounds had an exterior surface of 2,550 square inches, of which a
thousand were exposed to gunfire when he was facing an enemy frontally at close
range. Rebel musket balls seemed to fill every square inch of that Mystic
corridor, blasting enormous entry wounds into enemies panting for the
fieldstone wall. Among the British officers shot, “few had less than three
or four wounds,” a captain later wrote home. Men miraculously unharmed by
bullets or buckshot were spattered with wedges of tissue, dislodged teeth, and
skull fragments. After a final, futile surge, the regulars turned and ran
“in a very great disorder,” a witness reported. They left behind
ninety-six comrades, dead as mutton.
Howe heard the commotion below the riverbank to his right,
but the rail fence just ahead, stiff with hundreds of American gunmen, drew his
full attention. As he and the grenadiers took another stride, the top rail
erupted in flame and filthy smoke, quickly followed by a volley from the rebel
second rank. “The whole line was one blaze,” a young Sudbury
militiaman named Needham Maynard later recalled. “They fell in heaps,
actually in heaps.. The bodies lay there very thick.” Howe was unhurt, but
men on either side of him crumpled. Disemboweled grenadiers, some screaming,
some silent, tumbled one atop another. “I discharged my gun three times at
the British, taking deliberate aim as if at a squirrel,” wrote Simon
Fobes, a nineteen-year-old private from Bridgewater. “I had become calm as
a clock.”
Regulars from two trailing regiments hurried forward to fill
gaps in the grenadier line only to be gunned down. A crackle of musketry from
the three fleches to Howe’s left swept his corps with cross fire. Wounded
redcoats dragged themselves through the grass amid shrieks, curses, and
plaintive wails for mother. The British return fire tended to fly high: a stand
of apple trees behind the American line had few enemy balls embedded in the
trunks, but the “branches above were literally cut to pieces,”
Captain Henry Dearborn reported. A few lightly wounded rebels reloaded muskets
for their upright comrades, trimmed lead bullets to fit odd-sized barrels, or
acted as spotters: “There. See that officer?”
Howe pulled his men back briefly to regroup-“long
enough for us to clean our guns,” Maynard, the Sudbury militiaman,
noted-then heaved forward again only to be smashed once more. “Their
officers were shot down,” Maynard added. “There seemed to be nobody
to command ’em.” The British wounded included Lieutenant Colonel James
Abercrombie, the grenadier commander, shot in the thigh by jittery light
infantrymen who had joined the rail-fence fight after the carnage on the beach.
Before he died, a week later, Abercrombie would tell London that his own army
“gave me a plumper”-a volley-“and killed two officers and three
privates,” while wounding twenty others in fratricidal mayhem. The
undisciplined light companies, he suggested, “must be drilled before they
are carried to action again.” A jeering rebel who recognized the crippled
man being helped from the field shouted, “Colonel Abercrombie, are the
Yankees cowards?”
A dozen men in Howe’s command retinue were now dead or
wounded. “For near a minute,” an officer observed, “he was quite
alone.” At last Howe turned and trudged down the hill, unscathed, though
his white stockings were slick with British blood. “There was a
moment,” he subsequently told General Harvey, “that I never felt
before.”
Brigadier Pigot had suffered few casualties in feinting
toward the redoubt-cannonballs from the 24-pounders on Copp’s Hill kept
defenders crouched beneath their parapet. But now the weight of the British
assault necessarily shifted to his corps. Marines, three regiments, and various
detached companies pressed toward the crest of Breed’s Hill, bedeviled by
fences, stone walls, and what Burgoyne called “a thousand
impediments.” Approaching the redoubt, the line was “stopped by some
brick kilns and enclosures, and exposed for some time to the whole of its
fire,” a British ensign wrote. “And it was here that so many men were
lost.”
Volley upon volley crashed from the redoubt and the
protruding breastwork so that “the enemy fell like grass when mowed,”
a rebel fifer said. Ebenezer Bancroft, the militia captain from Dunstable,
observed, “Our first fire was shockingly fatal.” When a well-aimed
fusillade ripped into the regulars, a militiaman bellowed, “You have made
a furrow through them!” A diarist in the 47th Foot wrote that “for
about fifty minutes it resembled rather a continual sheet of lightning and an
uninterrupted peal of thunder than the explosion of firearms.” Some
regulars used dead redcoats to build their own breastworks. An American captain
reported that he fired all thirty-five rounds in his ammunition pouch, and then
threw stones.
Among the fallen was Major John Pitcairn, the conqueror of
Lexington Common, now dying in the grass from at least one ball in the chest. A
major in the 52nd Regiment was described by a subordinate as “lying about
ten yards from the redoubt in great agony” from five wounds; three dead
captains lay near him. “They advanced towards us in order to swallow us
up,” Private Peter Brown told his mother in Rhode Island, “but they
found a choaky mouthful of us.” An Irish comrade added, “Diamond cut
diamond, and that’s the whole story.”
#
Not quite, for diamond would now cut back. Bloody but
unbowed, William Howe drew up a new plan. With more than five hundred reserve
troops preparing to cross the Charles from Boston, he would renew the attack on
the redoubt by shifting two regiments and the surviving grenadiers from his own
corps to Pigot’s on the left. Companies would advance in tight columns rather
than broad assault lines; the regulars would lighten their loads by leaving
superfluous kit behind; and they were to attack swiftly, with bayonets only,
rather than pausing to shoot and reload. Moreover, eight fieldpieces now on the
battlefield would be hauled by drag ropes-each brass 6-pounder weighed a
quarter ton-to positions east of the redoubt to batter the defenders. Howe was
disgusted to learn that his artillery fire had slackened during the earlier
assaults because side boxes on the guns were found to contain 12-pound balls,
which were too fat for 6-pound muzzles. He ordered gunners to instead use
grapeshot, plum-sized iron balls packed in canvas bags that blew open when
fired.
Peering over the parapet from his battered redoubt, Colonel
Prescott watched the red tide again creep up the Breed’s pastureland. The 150
or so Americans remaining in his small fort-their faces blackened from soot and
powder, as if they’d been toiling in a coal yard-had little ammunition left.
Militiamen searched pockets for stray cartridges or tapped the final grains
from powder horns, tearing strips from their shirttails for wadding. Prescott
ordered the last artillery cartridges torn open and the loose powder
distributed to his infantry. Except for a single two-gun battery, the four
American artillery companies sent into battle had been all but useless this afternoon,
beset with cowardice, confusion, and technical ineptitude. Of six guns that
reached the peninsula, five now stood silent and the sixth had been hauled
away.
The failure of General Ward’s headquarters to resupply the
redoubt was almost as disheartening as the dearth of reinforcements. Among the
few doughty souls to arrive in mid-battle was a familiar if unlikely figure.
Dr. Joseph Warren-elegantly dressed in a light coat, a white satin waistcoat
with silver lace, and white breeches-strode through the sally port gripping a
borrowed gun, his earlier headache gone, or ignored, or mended by the huzzahs
that greeted him. Despite the high rank conferred several days earlier by the
provincial congress, Warren declined offers of command, insisting that he take
post in the line with other musketeers.
Up the peninsula, hundreds of leaderless militiamen “in
great confusion” ambled about on Bunker Hill or beyond the Neck, a
sergeant reported. A few without muskets brandished pitchforks, shillelaghs,
and at least one grain flail. Captain John Chester, who had just arrived with
his Connecticut company, found chaos: thirty men cowering behind an apple tree;
others behind rocks or haycocks; twenty more escorting a single wounded comrade
toward Cambridge “when not more than three or four could touch him to advantage.
Others were retreating seemingly without any excuse.” One colonel,
described as “unwieldy from excessive corpulence,” lay sprawled on
the ground, proclaiming his exhaustion. British gunners aboard Glasgow and
Symmetry continued to scorch the Neck with iron shot, giving pause to even the
lionhearted. “The orders were press on, press on,” wrote Lieutenant
Samuel Blachley Webb, now skittering toward the redoubt with Chester’s
Connecticut company. “Good God how the balls flew. I freely acknowledge I
never had such a tremor come over me before.”
#
The sun had begun to dip in the southwestern sky, dimmed by
the black coils of smoke above Charlestown, when Pigot’s legions again drew
near, high-stepping their dead. British grapeshot spattered the earthworks,
driving defenders from the parapet even as American fire wounded a dozen
gunners shouldering the fieldpieces into position. “They looked too
handsome to be fired at,” Corporal Francis Merrifield lamented, “but
we had to do it.” Prescott told his men to wait until the British vanguard
was within thirty yards of the redoubt walls; on command, militiamen hopped up
on their fire steps, and a point-blank volley staggered the enemy ranks again.
A ball clipped the skull of Captain George Harris, commanding the 5th Foot
grenadier company; dragged through the grass by a lieutenant, Harris cried,
“For God’s sake, let me die in peace.” Of four grenadiers who carried
him to a nearby copse, three were wounded, one mortally.
But the battle had turned. Regulars pressed close on three
sides, leaping across a narrow ditch to hug the berm before scaling the steep
ramparts. American gunshots grew scattered; some Jonathans saved their last
round to shoot British officers atop the parapet. “Our firing began to
slacken. At last it went out like an old candle,” Needham Maynard
recalled. More redcoats tumbled into the redoubt, now shooting. “Take
their guns away,” Prescott yelled, “twitch ’em away.” Enemies
grappled, grunting and swearing. A brown miasma of smoke and churning dust hung
in the air. Americans swung their muskets as clubs, fighting “more like
devils than men,” a regular reported, and when the walnut stocks
shattered, they swung the bent barrels or threw rocks.
Prescott was among the last to escape, “stepping long,
with his sword up,” parrying bayonet thrusts that snagged his banyan but
not his flesh. Peter Brown scrambled over the wall and ran for half a mile;
musket balls, he told his mother, “flew like hail stones.” Captain
Bancroft fought his way out, first with a musket butt, then with his fists,
bullets nicking his hat and coat and shearing off his left forefinger. Corporal
Farnsworth of Groton would tell his diary, “I received a wound in my right
arm, the ball going through a little below my elbow.. Another ball struck my
back, taking a piece of skin about as big as a penny.. I was in great
pain.”
They were the lucky ones. “Nothing could be more
shocking than the carnage that followed the storming of this work,” wrote
Lieutenant John Waller of the 1st Marines. “We tumbled over the dead to
get at the living, who were crowding out of the gorge of the redoubt..’Twas
streaming with blood & strewed with dead and dying men, the soldiers
stabbing some and dashing out the brains of others.” Thirty American
bodies, some mutilated beyond recognition, lay scattered across the shambles.
The triumphant, vengeful roar of British regulars could be heard in Boston.
Lieutenant Webb and his Connecticut militia arrived to see
the melee spill from the sally port. “I had no other feeling but that of
revenge,” he wrote. “Four men were shot dead within five feet to me..
I escaped with only the graze of a musket ball on my hat.” Dr. Warren did
not escape: sixty yards from the redoubt, a bullet hit him below the left eye
and blew through the back of his head. He toppled without a word.
By five-thirty p. m., rebel forces were in full retreat up
the peninsula, bounding from fence to fence, barn to barn, leaving a debris
trail of cartridge boxes, tumplines, goatskin knapsacks, even coats and hats
shed in the heat of the day. The wounded hobbled, or were carried on backs or
in stretchers fashioned from blankets and muskets. On their heels came not only
Pigot’s regiments but Howe’s regular regiments and grenadiers, who had bulled
through the breastworks and the three fleches. Also in pursuit was General
Clinton, who on his own initiative had crossed the Charles from Copp’s Hill,
rallied regulars milling in the rear of Pigot’s corps, then circled north to
give chase. “All was in confusion,” he wrote. “I never saw so
great a want of order.”
Yet for the rebels, disorder brought salvation. The New
Hampshire and Connecticut regiments, seeing the redoubt fall, pulled back from
the rail fence in an orderly withdrawal to give covering fire for Prescott’s
fugitives. Some militiamen loitering atop Bunker Hill advanced down the slope
to pelt the British pursuers with bullets, a belated but vital contribution to
the battle. “The retreat was no flight,” Burgoyne would write.
“It was even covered with bravery and military skill.” Howe had seen
enough and suffered enough: when Clinton confronted him north of the redoubt to
urge pursuit to the Neck and beyond, Howe “called me back,” Clinton
wrote later, “I thought a little forcibly.”
Americans by the hundreds surged through the gantlet of
naval gunfire still scything the only exit from the peninsula. Some died within
yards of safety, including Major Andrew McClary, one of Stark’s Hampshiremen,
hit with a frigate cannonball. “He leaped two or three feet from the
ground, pitched forward, and fell dead upon his face,” an officer
reported. But most straggled unharmed onto the high ground beyond the Neck,
exhausted and tormented by thirst. General Putnam followed on his white horse,
cradling an armful of salvaged entrenching tools. “I never saw such a
carnage of the human race,” he would be quoted as saying.
For now the carnage was over, mostly. Rebel snipers in trees
and houses across the Neck continued to plink away at enemy pickets, killing a
38th Foot lieutenant with a random shot. The British answered with broadsides
from Glasgow and salvos from a 12-pounder. Charlestown burned and burned,
painting the low clouds bright orange in what one diarist called “a
sublime scene of military magnificence and ruin.” Marines landed in skiffs
to set fire to wooden structures that had escaped the earlier flames. Prescott,
ever pugnacious, vowed to retake his lost hill that night if given ammunition,
bayonets, and three rested regiments. General Ward sensibly demurred.
“Dearest Friend,” Abigail Adams wrote from
Braintree to her husband, John, then meeting in Philadelphia with the
Continental Congress. “The day, perhaps the decisive day, is come on which
the fate of America depends.” She continued:
Charlestown is laid in ashes.. Tis expected they will come
out over the Neck tonight, and a dreadful battle must ensue.. The constant roar
of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot eat, drink, or sleep. Night
fell. The British did not come. From Prospect and Winter Hills above the
Cambridge road came the excavating sounds of mattock and spade, as militiamen
once again stacked their muskets and began to dig the next line of resistance.
#
British medicos scuffed through the high grass to feel with
their feet for the dead and the merely dying, then held their flickering
lanterns close to distinguish between the two. Those with a pulse or a glint in
the eye were hoisted onto drays and wheeled to barges on the Charles for
transport to Boston. “The cries and moans of the dying was shocking,”
wrote General Clinton, who also picked his way across the battlefield. “I
had conversation with many of these poor wretches in their dying moments.”
Later studies by the British Army would demonstrate that
soldiers wearing conspicuous red uniforms were more than twice as likely to be
shot in combat as those in muted blues and grays. The tally at Breed’s Hill
seemed to anticipate those findings: Gage’s army had regained roughly a square
mile of rebel territory at a cost exceeding a thousand casualties, or more than
a man lost per acre won. Over 40 percent of the attacking force had been killed
or wounded, including 226 dead; losses were especially doleful in the elite
flanker companies-the light infantry and grenadiers. Nineteen officers also had
been killed. Of all the king’s officers who would die in battle during the long
war against the Americans, more than one out of every eight had perished in
four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown.
Casualties in some units were calamitous. All but four
grenadiers from the King’s Own were killed or wounded. Of thirty-eight men in
the 35th Foot light company, only three escaped rebel bullets; with every
officer, sergeant, and corporal hit, the senior private led other surviving
privates. After sustaining 123 casualties, British marines were nonplussed to
find that their tents in Boston had been plundered during the battle, apparently
by regulars not in the field. The Admiralty voiced “astonishment that it
could have happened” but declined to pay compensation, because of the
precedent such reimbursement would set. Howe, who lost virtually his entire
staff to death or injury, admitted to General Harvey that when he studied the
casualty lists, “I do it with horror.”
