Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 21

Washington had gotten at least a portion of what he wanted, but he remained resentful that his original plan to attack the city across the ice had been rejected. As late as February 26, he wrote Joseph Reed, "But behold! though we had been waiting all the year for this favorable event, the enterprise was thought too dangerous!" But even Washington had to admit that he might have allowed his own mounting frustrations to interfere with his better judgment. In one of the most confiding letters he ever wrote to a member of the Continental Congress, he acknowledged to John Hanc.o.c.k that "the irksomeness of my situation ... might have inclined me to put more to hazard than was consistent with prudence." The immense pressures of conducting a siege without the resources required to win it had, he confessed, taken a toll. "To have the eyes of the whole continent fixed with anxious expectation of hearing of some great event and to be restrained in every military operation for want of the necessary means of carrying it on, is not very pleasing; especially as the means used to conceal my weakness from the enemy conceals it also from our friends, and adds to their wonder." In the meantime, he would do his best to embrace the plan "to take post on Dorchester" and see whether, he wrote Reed, "the enemy will be so kind as to come out to us."

Nathanael Greene was Washington's youngest general, but no one on the council of war had a better appreciation of the dilemma facing their commander in chief. An attack on Boston, Greene wrote his brother, "would be horrible if it succeeded and still more horrible if it failed." And yet, he continued, "the advantage that America would derive from making ourselves masters of the garrison at this time would be inconceivable. It would damp the spirits of Great Britain and give ours a new spring. In a word, it would put a finishing stroke to the war; it would heal all the divisions among ourselves, silence the Tories and work a general reformation throughout the continent." No wonder Washington yearned to attack Boston.

Artemas Ward may have been the earliest and most forceful proponent of the plan to take Dorchester Heights, but Washington acted quickly to give the operation his own personal stamp. As he had witnessed during the construction of the fortifications at Lechmere Point, the freezing temperatures meant that building a redoubt atop the bare, wind-swept hills of Dorchester was going to be no easy matter. By this time a self-taught engineer of unusual promise, thirty-eight-year-old Rufus Putnam of Braintree (and a cousin of General Israel Putnam), had come to his attention. Unlike Henry Knox, everything Putnam knew about the subject of fortifications came not from books but from practical experience, which was admittedly slight. Despite having worked beside several British engineers during the French and Indian War, he "pretended no knowledge of laying works" and had been reluctant to volunteer his services at the beginning of the siege. At the insistence of William Heath, he agreed to try his hand at building the fortifications at Roxbury, and he was soon overseeing the construction of works at Cobble Hill and other critical locations.

Around the time of the February council of war, Washington invited Putnam to dine at his headquarters, asking that he "tarry after dinner." Once the two of them were alone, the general "entered in a free conversation on the subject of storming the town of Boston." By this point, Washington was at least publicly stating that it would be best to begin such an operation by occupying Dorchester; what he wanted Putnam to figure out was how to quickly build a fortification on ground that was frozen solid. "If I could think of any way in which it could be done," Putnam wrote, "[I was] to make a report to him immediately."

That evening, Putnam was on his way back to his quarters in Roxbury when he decided to stop by the residence of General Heath and "pay my respects." Heath happened to be in, and the officers were soon enjoying a companionable chat when Putnam noticed a book on Heath's table by the noted British military engineer John Muller. "I immediately requested the general to lend it me," he wrote. But Heath refused, claiming that "he never lent his books." "I then told him," Putnam related, "that he must recollect that he was the one who at Roxbury in a measure compelled [me] to undertake a business of which at the time I confessed I never had read a word about and that he must let me have the book." After "some more excuses on his part," Heath finally allowed Putnam to borrow the book.

Not until the next morning did Putnam finally open John Muller's Attack and Defense of Fortified Places. On page 4 he discovered an engineering term he had never heard before: "chandelier." Upon reading the definition, he quickly realized that he had found the solution for building a fort on Dorchester Heights.

A chandelier (the fortification frame, not the lighting ornament) is a double-ended wooden scaffold that sits on the ground; when it is placed beside another chandelier, the open s.p.a.ce between the two frames is then filled up with fascines, bundles of tree branches that when covered with dirt form the basis of a cannon-proof bulwark. With the help of dozens of precut chandeliers and many more fascines, the Americans could almost instantly create the beginnings of a fort atop Dorchester Heights. With the addition of some of the cannons that had been brought down from Ticonderoga, they would be able to present the British with the illusion, if not the reality (since they still lacked the gunpowder required to do any significant damage with their artillery), of an armed fortress capable of bombarding into oblivion both Boston and the many men-of-war in the harbor. The British would have only two alternatives: launch a desperate sortie against the fort or evacuate.

Once Washington heard of Rufus Putnam's plan, he directed both Henry Knox and the man whom Knox had superseded as head of the artillery regiment, Richard Gridley, to consult with Putnam and determine whether chandeliers might provide a feasible solution to the problem. According to Putnam, "They fell in with my plan." The general approved their report, and "preparations [were] immediately set on foot to carry it into effect."

Plenty of challenges still remained. The road from Roxbury to Dorchester traversed a neck of lowland that was in plain view of the British sentries stationed in Boston. The darkness would help, but some sort of blind needed to be built on the city side of the road that somehow managed to conceal both the sights and the sounds of hundreds of ox-driven carts carrying materials to the Heights. Rufus Putnam initially recommended using stones, since the surrounding terrain was crisscrossed by so many walls, but eventually decided to go with seven-hundred-pound bundles of compressed hay.

In addition to preparing chandeliers and other materials typically used in constructing a fortress, such as fascines and gabions, the Americans built, at the suggestion of the Boston merchant William Davis, barrels. Once filled with stone, gravel, and sand, the barrels could be used to sh.o.r.e up the fort's walls. However, in the event of a British attack, the barrels had yet another, potentially devastating use. As the regulars climbed up the steep, almost treeless hillside, the barrels could be, in the words of William Heath, "rolled down the hill [and] must have thrown the a.s.sailants into the utmost confusion and have killed and wounded great numbers." Even as the barrels and other materials were being prepared in and around Roxbury, carpenters in Cambridge were building forty-five flat-bottomed bateaux-each capable of carrying eighty men-along with two floating batteries, in antic.i.p.ation of an American amphibious a.s.sault on Boston.

The Americans might not have much powder, but all agreed that some kind of cannonade of Boston was necessary on the night they took Dorchester Heights. With cannons blazing in Cobble Hill, Lechmere Point, and Roxbury, the British might be too preoccupied to notice what was happening to the southeast in Dorchester. Knox had already begun to install some of his newly acquired cannons in these three sites, and plans were put in place to begin firing on the British several days prior to the move on Dorchester. Not only would this provide Knox's artillery teams with some practice prior to the main event, it would further the illusion that the Americans had finally secured ample stores of powder. The trick was to fire as few shots as possible while still engaging the British army's attention.

All that remained to be decided was the date of the move on Dorchester. For the first time, Quartermaster Thomas Mifflin was invited to a council of war-no doubt because the operation was proving to be as much a logistical as a military challenge. During the meeting, Mifflin related how a friend had suggested that the night of March 4 would be the most appropriate for the move to the Heights. If, as hoped, the British attacked the next day, what might be the battle to end all battles would occur on March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Ma.s.sacre. Mifflin said that this "would have a wonderful effect upon the spirits of the New Englanders." For some reason, Horatio Gates "deemed it an improper time," but after a spirited debate the council decided, "by a majority of one," to launch the operation on the night of March 4.

Washington's great fear was that the British might learn of the intended advance and seize Dorchester Heights before the Americans could make their move. The near-constant arrival of militiamen and the cutting of trees for fascines and abatis (the Warren family apple orchard in Roxbury was soon sacrificed to the cause) meant that just about everyone living in the towns surrounding Boston knew that something significant was about to happen. On the night of February 26, what Washington described as "a rascally rifleman" deserted to the British. Convinced that the enemy now knew of their plans, Washington ordered Artemas Ward in Roxbury to station "six or eight trusty men by way of lookouts" while preparing several regiments "to be ready to march at a moment's warning to the heights of Dorchester; for should the enemy get possession of those hills before us they would render it a difficult task to dispossess them."

On February 27, he issued an order intended to prepare the army for the impending confrontation while making it clear that instances of cowardice similar to those that had marred the Battle of Bunker Hill were not to be tolerated:

As the season is now fast approaching, [he wrote,] when every man must expect to be drawn into the field of action, it is highly necessary that he should prepare his mind, as well as everything necessary for it. It is a n.o.ble cause we are engaged in; it is the cause of virtue and mankind. Every temporal advantage and comfort to us and our posterity depends upon the vigor of our exertions; in short, freedom or slavery must be the result of our conduct. There can therefore be no greater inducement to men to behave well. But it may not be amiss for the troops to know that if any man in action shall presume to skulk, hide himself, or retreat from the enemy, without the orders of his commanding officer, he will be instantly shot down as an example of cowardice, cowards having too frequently disconcerted the best formed troops by their dastardly behavior.

In antic.i.p.ation of the confrontation that might win or lose the siege and perhaps even the war, Washington began to clear his desk of the considerable paperwork that had acc.u.mulated over the last eight months. Back in October, the African American poet Phillis Wheatley had sent a poem she had written praising him. "Not knowing whether it might not be considered rather as a mark of my own vanity than as a compliment to her," he explained in a letter to Joseph Reed, "I laid it aside till I came across it ... while searching over a parcel of papers the other day in order to destroy such as were useless." On February 28, in the midst of the feverish preparation for the move on Dorchester, he wrote the poet a letter, apologizing for the delay and praising her poem as "striking proof of your great poetical talents." Then Washington, the owner of several hundred slaves in Virginia, did something remarkable. He invited the young black woman to pay him a visit. "If you should ever come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the muses."

He attended to personal business as well, writing to his wife's brother-in-law, Burwell Ba.s.sett, about "my landed affairs on the Ohio." Washington had originally purchased this vast tract of land as an investment. He was now beginning to look to the property as a possible refuge. If "the worst event" should occur on March 5-if the war should be lost and he was stripped of his estate at Mount Vernon-this land along the Ohio River "will," he explained to Ba.s.sett, "serve for an asylum."

On the night of March 2, cannons in Lechmere Point began lobbing in both shot (solid cannonb.a.l.l.s) and sh.e.l.ls (hollow projectiles containing explosives) into Boston. Archibald Robertson, a thirty-year-old British engineer stationed at the newly constructed battery on what he and his fellow countrymen called Mount Wh.o.r.edom, just beside Beacon Hill, estimated that the rebels fired "11 shots and 13 sh.e.l.ls without hurting anybody." He also noted that a few equally harmless sh.e.l.ls had been fired from Roxbury.

The next morning Washington was chagrined to learn that the only significant damage sustained that night had been self-inflicted. Three American mortars had split open, probably because they had been improperly bedded on the frozen ground. On the following night, the much-ballyhooed "Congress"-the cannon that had come with the taking of the Nancy-split open after firing only its third sh.e.l.l. The American artillery regiment's already limited ability to cannonade Boston had been severely curtailed. Apparently Knox and his officers still had much to learn.

But on the night of March 4, Knox's regiment exonerated itself. At 7:00 p.m. the firing began from Roxbury, Lechmere Point, and Cobble Hill at almost ten times the rate of the previous nights as the British responded with a furious cannonade of their own. One observer reported that there were instances when the fiery trails of as many as seven sh.e.l.ls could be seen crisscrossing the night sky. In Braintree, Abigail Adams arose from bed around one in the morning. "I could no more sleep," she wrote her husband, "than if I had been in the engagement. The rattling of the windows, the jar of the house and the continual roar of 24-pounders, the bursting of sh.e.l.ls ... realize a scene to us of which we could scarcely form any conception." Samuel Webb on Cobble Hill reported that "our sh.e.l.l raked the houses terribly, and the cries of poor women and children frequently reached our ears." According to Archibald Robertson in Boston, the American artillery succeeded in killing or wounding six British regulars, with one officer writing, "it is agreed on all hands that their artillery officers are at least equal to our own."

The preparations for the advance to Dorchester Heights had begun the previous morning as Quartermaster Mifflin supervised the organization of more than 350 oxen carts. Sunset was at 5:35, and it soon proved to be the perfect night: a low-lying haze prevented the British from seeing much of anything beyond Boston as a full moon provided the Americans with the light they needed to find their way to Dorchester, and a southerly wind blew whatever noise the soldiers made "into the harbor between the town and the Castle."

At 7:00 p.m., two "covering parties" of four hundred soldiers each crossed the Neck into Dorchester and, after mounting the heights, took up positions where they could watch for the British soldiers both in Boston and at the Castle. Next came General Thomas with a work party of approximately twelve hundred soldiers, followed by the wagons, each driver urging his oxen "in a whispering tone." Soon a total of three thousand of what Thomas described as "picked men" were at work, laying huge bundles of hay along the Neck to act as a screen, and once on the Heights, a.s.sembling two different forts-one facing the Castle, the other facing Boston. The chandeliers were quickly arranged and the fascines put in place as the men went to work with their picks and shovels, digging ditches and hurling the frozen clods of dirt onto the breastworks. They labored with astonishing speed and efficiency, and after only a couple hours' work, as the carts continued to go back and forth in silence, General Thomas was pleased to note that "they had got two forts, one upon each hill, sufficient to defend them from small arms and grape shot." He took out his pocket watch and was amazed to discover that it was only ten o'clock. As it so happened, at almost precisely the same time, the British sentinels in Boston relayed word to Brigadier General Francis Smith (who had received a promotion since leading his troops to Concord a little less than a year before) that "the rebels were at work on Dorchester Heights." As on the night before the Battle of Bunker Hill, no one within the British leadership chose to act on the information.

The next morning the British were astounded to see two towering forts atop the hills of Dorchester. "They were all raised during the night," an awestruck officer wrote, "with an expedition equal to that of the Genii belonging to Aladdin's wonderful lamp." Thanks to the magnifying effect of the haze that lay on the land and water, the American works "loomed to great advantage and appeared larger than the reality." The minister William Gordon later learned that "Howe was seen to scratch his head and heard to say by those that were about him, that he did not know what he should do, that the provincials ... had done more work in one night than his whole army would have done in six months." The engineer Archibald Robertson estimated that the fortifications must have been the work of between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand men.

The rumor among the Americans was that Howe had long since vowed that should they dare to "break ground" on Dorchester Heights he would "sally on us [even] if he was sure of losing two-thirds of his army." As the soldiers atop Dorchester Heights waited to see whether Howe was as good as his supposed word, the British batteries began firing at the new forts. The surgeon James Thacher was with the soldiers on the Heights. "Cannon shot are continually rolling and rebounding over the hill," he wrote in his diary, "and it is astonishing to observe how little our soldiers are terrified by them." But the British artillerymen had a problem. Dorchester Heights was simply too high for them to fire at it effectively. "They endeavored to elevate their cannons so as to breach our works by sinking the hinder wheels ... into the earth," General John Sullivan wrote, "but after an unsuccessful fire of about two hours, they grew weary of it and desisted."

Even before the cessation of artillery fire, onlookers began to make their way to Dorchester. "The hills and elevations in this vicinity are covered with spectators," James Thacher reported, "to witness deeds of horror in the expected conflict." All of Boston lay before them. "Nothing could take place at the wharves or next to the water," one observer wrote, "but we could note it by the help of gla.s.ses." It certainly looked as if Howe were preparing to attack. "The wharf was thronged with soldiers," wrote William Gordon, who along with Thacher was "looking upon the adjacent hills for a b.l.o.o.d.y battle." As the regulars boarded transports and were taken to the Castle, the natural staging ground for an attack, the Americans on Dorchester Heights "rejoiced at seeing it, clapped their hands and wished for the expected attack."

Their British counterparts were not as enthusiastic. A Boston resident later recounted how the regulars lined up along the town's streets "looked in general pale and dejected and said to one another that it would be another Bunker's Hill affair or worse." In antic.i.p.ation of scaling the American bulwarks, they collected ladders and cut them into ten-foot lengths.

The optimum time for a British attack was at high tide, which was at two that afternoon, and the Americans watched with mounting excitement to see whether Howe dared to go through with it. By this time Washington had appeared on the Heights and was overheard exhorting, "Remember it is the fifth of March!" and "Avenge the death of your brethren!" "It was immediately asked," William Gordon wrote, "what the general had said by those that were not near enough to hear, and as soon answered; and so from one to another through all the troops, which added fresh fuel to the martial fire before kindled."

All the while, on the other side of the Boston peninsula, four thousand American soldiers under the commands of Generals Putnam, Sullivan, and Greene were waiting at the mouth of the Charles River, ready to climb into their boats and begin the a.s.sault of the city. Greene and half the troops were to land just to the south of Barton's Point at the northwestern tip of Boston; Sullivan was to come ash.o.r.e at the Boston Common; both were to fight their way through the city until they reached the town gate and joined their compatriots coming in from Roxbury.

But as it turned out, Howe had decided to delay the move on Dorchester Heights until the following morning. That night the surgeon James Thacher's regiment, which had been on station for the last twenty-four hours, was allowed to return to their barracks in Roxbury for some rest. "I bade adieu to Dorchester Heights," he recorded in his journal in the early morning hours of March 6, "without being called to dress a single wound."

For William Howe and his officers, it proved to be a most tension-filled evening and night. Archibald Robertson, for one, believed that the general was making a terrible mistake by even considering an attack. The American works atop the Heights were simply too formidable. Instead of mounting an a.s.sault, "we ought immediately to embark" and leave Boston. "The fate of this whole army and the town is at stake," he wrote in his diary at four that afternoon, "not to say the fate of America." After communicating his concerns to every superior officer he could find, he went to Province House, where at 7:00 p.m. Howe and his generals were in the midst of a council of war. Robertson waited outside the door for more than an hour until his commanding officer, the engineer Captain John Montresor, stepped out of the room. Montresor also believed that they had no choice but to evacuate, and he told Robertson that he had said as much during the council of war. He also recounted how "Lord Percy and some others seconded him," and only then did Howe confess that evacuation had been "his own sentiment from the first" and that it was "the honor of the troops" that had moved him to order an attack. Howe had "agreed immediately," Montresor continued, "to embark everything." As Washington's council of war had done three weeks before, Howe's officers had prevented their commander from making a decision that might have destroyed both his army and Boston.

If Howe had any lingering doubts when he went to bed that night, the weather decided the matter for all of them. A storm that some judged to be a hurricane blew up out of the south, knocking down buildings and blowing two of the troop transports moored off the Castle onto the sh.o.r.e of nearby Governors Island. Even if Howe had wanted to, he could not have launched an attack on Dorchester Heights.

At eleven the next morning, Howe called together the army's commanding officers and "acquainted them with his intentions of evacuating this place and going to Halifax." Washington did not get the chance to attack Boston. Signals had been prepared at the meetinghouse in Roxbury to mark the moment when the amphibious a.s.sault was to be launched. "But kind heaven," William Heath wrote, "which more than once saved the Americans when they would have destroyed themselves, did not allow the signals to be made."

On March 8, a British officer bearing a letter from the Boston town selectmen approached the American lines at Roxbury under a flag of truce. General Howe, the selectmen indicated, would not burn the town if the Americans allowed the British to evacuate. This was hopeful news to be sure, but Washington remained fearful that Howe was in fact stalling for time so that he could launch one final thrust against the American forces. As the days pa.s.sed and Howe's army remained in Boston, Washington attempted to hurry the British along by building a fortification at Dorchester Heights that was even closer to Boston. Howe responded to each new move on the Americans' part with artillery fire (in one instance killing several Continental soldiers), and as the day of departure approached, the British general was terrifyingly close to torching the town, a prospect that kept the Bostonians in an unremitting state of apprehension and alarm.

All the while, chaos reigned in the city as the British soldiers struggled to collect as many of their stores as possible for transportation to Halifax. Due to the Admiralty's almost criminal undermanning of the naval vessels, there was a severe lack of sailors to operate the evacuation fleet. This wasn't the only problem thrust upon General Howe by his superiors in London. "When the transports came to be examined," an officer wrote, "they were void of both provisions and forage... . Never troops in so disgraceful a situation, and that not in the least to their own fault or owing to any want of skill or discretion in our commanders, but entirely owing to Great Britain being fast asleep. I pity General Howe from my soul." Dozens of perfectly serviceable sailing vessels were tied up to the wharves, but without the needed sailors and provisions Howe was unable to use them.

The departing British army had no choice but to leave behind a vast amount of heavy armaments and other supplies. To prevent the artillery pieces from being used against them, the soldiers hammered metal rods into the cannons' touchholes, a procedure known as spiking the guns. As preparations to leave extended into the second week, marauding gangs of soldiers and sailors plundered stores and houses. Howe issued orders that looters be shot on sight, but the stealing continued.

For the region's loyalists, who had sought sanctuary from patriot reprisals, the decision to evacuate Boston was overwhelming. "The Tories ... carried death in their faces," one inhabitant wrote, "some run distracted." Washington reported that "by all accounts there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures now are... . When the order [was] issued for embarking the troops in Boston, no electric shock-no sudden clap of thunder-in a word the last trump-could not have struck them with greater consternation. They are at their wit's end."

Howe did what he could to accommodate all those who wanted to accompany his army to Halifax, but once again, there was not enough room for all their furnishings and possessions. In the brigantine Unity was the family of Adino Paddock, the former commander of Boston's artillery company, along with seven other loyalist households. The outspoken customs commissioner Benjamin Hallowell, the owner of two mansions-one in Boston, the other in Roxbury-found himself sleeping in a cabin with thirty-six others, "men, women, and children; parents, masters, and mistresses, obliged to pig together on the floor, there being no berths." The province's treasurer, Harrison Gray, who two and a half years before had admonished Josiah Quincy Jr. for his treasonous words in the Old South Meetinghouse, boarded the Francis, along with thirty-seven others. A total of eleven hundred loyalists divided among thirty vessels ultimately left the wharves of Boston, first sailing past the Castle to the Nantasket Roads at the western end of the harbor, five miles from the city, where they anch.o.r.ed near Paddock and Hull islands and waited for the arrival of the fifty transports bearing the nine thousand soldiers of Howe's army.

Many of the loyalists would settle in Canada; others went to England. Neither place seemed like home. Some, such as the lawyer Daniel Leonard, who was named chief justice of Bermuda, established new and flourishing careers. A few, such as Dr. John Jeffries, to whom Joseph Warren had offered the position of surgeon general of the provincial army, eventually returned to Boston and through a combination of personal charm and professional ability once again became respected members of the community. But that was decades in the future, and an exception to the rule of forgiveness. Bostonians, like their Puritan forebears, would prove to have long and exacting memories.

By purging itself of loyalists, Boston had, in a sense, reaffirmed its origins. The town's first settlers had put an ocean between them and their king so that they could worship as they pleased. They were unafraid of risk; otherwise they never would have left England for a new and unknown land. Over the course of the next century and a half, Boston had grown from a settlement of a few hundred Puritans to a diverse and thriving port with a strong commercial connection to London. Many Bostonians, particularly the merchants, had come to cherish their ties to Great Britain. In the last decade, however, a new generation of risk takers had staged a revolution, and those who refused to disavow the mother country were about to sail to Halifax, never to return. Boston was, once again, its own "city on a hill."

The engineer Archibald Robertson was one of the last to leave. He had spent the two previous days throwing up barriers across the streets and wharves of Boston to impede the progress of any American soldiers who might try to hara.s.s the evacuating regulars. Howe had ordered the town's citizens to remain confined in their homes so they didn't interfere with his army's final preparations to depart. Robertson walked the empty, weirdly quiet waterfront. More than twenty-five brigs, schooners, sloops, and ships had been abandoned, some still full of stores, all of them scuttled. General Gage's chariot lay broken on Long Wharf. The dragoons had left 110 horses in the stables at the rope walks, along with ten tons of hay. "There seems a vast deal of confusion in every department," Robertson recorded in his diary, "and no settled plan of operations."

By 9:00 a.m. on March 17, a Sunday, "all the regiments but the rear guard were embarked." Robertson, Captain Montresor, and three others lingered on Long Wharf, ready to set fire to a few houses if the enemy should prematurely storm the city, "but none appeared and we went all off in the greatest order." By ten o'clock he was at the Castle and could see "the rebels on the heights of Charlestown and making a great parade on Dorchester Heights." As it so happened, March 17 was St. Patrick's Day, a date celebrated by Irish Protestants in Boston since 1737. Now Bostonians had yet another reason to celebrate March 17, a date that became known as Evacuation Day.

A young officer named James Wilkinson from Maryland was one of the first into the city. Wilkinson had come via the Charlestown peninsula, where the British had delayed the arrival of the American troops by leaving several "effigies" that looked like regulars with their muskets shouldered. Only after General John Sullivan had determined that the fortress at Bunker Hill was "defended by lifeless sentries" had Wilkinson and the others been allowed to cross the Neck. Near "the ruins of Charlestown ... now buried in its own ashes," he'd found a canoe in which he and several others paddled to Boston "on the presumption the enemy had taken their departure." After disembarking at the waterfront, they'd followed "a long narrow winding street" but were unable to find a living soul to talk to. "The town presented a frightful solitude in the bosom of a numerous population ... ," he remembered; "a death-like silence pervaded an inhabited city, and spectacles of waste and spoil struck the eye at almost every step."

Even days later, the three thousand or so Bostonians who had lasted out the siege had a muted, exhausted air about them. James Thacher marched into the city three days after the evacuation. "The inhabitants appeared at their doors and windows," he wrote; "though they manifested a lively joy on being liberated from a long imprisonment, they were not altogether free from melancholy gloom which ten tedious months' siege has spread over their countenances." Two days later, Thacher watched as "a concourse of people from the country crowd[ed] into town, full of friendly solicitude. It is truly interesting to witness the tender interviews and fond embraces of those who have been long separated."

One of those left pining for a reunion was John Andrews, whose beloved wife Ruthy was not able to return to Boston for several weeks. He missed her terribly, but to his brother-in-law in Philadelphia he a.s.serted that despite all he'd suffered over the course of the last five months, he'd "never suffered the least depression of spirits ... for a persuasion that my country would eventually prevail, kept up my spirits, and never suffered my hopes to fail." Andrews's good mood was no doubt reinforced when at the end of March none other than George Washington, accompanied by Martha and her son and daughter-in-law, came to his house for dinner "with no earlier notice," he wrote his brother-in-law, "than half past eleven the same day."

Two days after the evacuation, the British saw fit to destroy the fortifications at the Castle with a spectacular series of explosions. The resulting fire raged throughout the night with such intensity that a lieutenant from Connecticut discovered that even though he was several miles away he was able to read a letter from his wife by the light of the burning fortress. The fate of the Castle served as a fresh reminder of the devastation that had been avoided through the occupation of Dorchester Heights. Washington, however, continued "lamenting the disappointment" of not having been able to implement what he described in a letter to a friend in Virginia as his "premeditated plan" to attack Boston, "as we were prepared for them at all points."

Even though he still wished he had been given the chance to attack Boston-an a.s.sault that would have surely laid much of the city to waste and probably destroyed his army-Washington was now perceived as the general who had rescued Boston from ruin. On March 28, the day after the British evacuation fleet finally departed the Nantasket Roads for Halifax, the Boston selectmen formally thanked him for having "saved a large, elegant, and once populous city from total destruction." His Excellency responded in kind, claiming that "what greatly adds to my happiness [is] that this desirable event has been effected with so little effusion of human blood."

There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of Washington's remarks. One of his greatest gifts was his ability to learn from a situation, and by the end of March-three weeks after the taking of Dorchester Heights-he had, with considerable reluctance, started to reconcile himself to the fact that what he wanted to happen in any given situation was ultimately beside the point. "I will not lament or repine at any act of Providence," he wrote Reed, "because I am in a great measure a convert to [the poet] Mr. Pope's opinion that whatever is, is right." This did not prevent him from once again rehashing in his letter all the reasons why his plan to attack the city would have worked, but the evidence was nonetheless clear: Washington had begun to recognize that his role as commander in chief was not all about winning glory on the battlefield. If he had failed to head off a coming war with one brilliant and b.l.o.o.d.y stroke, he had accomplished something far more difficult. He had forged the beginning of an army that might-just might-lay the groundwork for a new American society.

On the morning of April 4, Washington left his headquarters in Cambridge and began what proved to be a ten-day march to New York. Soon after, John Warren and his brother Eben located their older brother's body in its shallow grave on Breed's Hill. The remains were badly decomposed, but the same false teeth that had allowed Dr. Jeffries to make the identification soon after the Battle of Bunker Hill also enabled John and Eben to verify that this was indeed their brother. A funeral service was held at King's Chapel, which, being an Anglican church and made of stone, had suffered no damage during the British occupation.

Warren was buried with all the honors due a former grand master of the St. Andrew's Masonic Lodge. One prominent mason, however, was unable to attend the service. The merchant John Rowe had spent much of the last year and a half not sure of where he stood when it came to the tug-of-war between patriot and loyalist interests. But when Rowe arrived at King's Chapel on April 8 "to attend and walk in procession with the lodges under my jurisdiction with our proper jewels and clothing," he was-to his "great mortification"-"very much insulted by some furious and hot persons without the least provocation." One of his fellow masons thought it "most prudent for me to retire." That evening, Rowe was plagued by "some uneasy reflections in my mind as I am not conscious to myself of doing anything prejudicial to the cause of America either by will or deed."

In June, Benjamin Church was returned to Boston from his confinement in Connecticut. The General Court's plans to exchange him for an American prisoner inspired what Church's wife described as "a riot." The town's inhabitants wanted to see the hated spy suitably punished. Once tempers eventually cooled, Church was allowed to board a ship for Martinique in January 1778. When the ship was lost in a storm with all hands, Bostonians could rest a.s.sured that justice had finally been served.