Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 5

CHAPTER FOUR

The Alarm

Each town in Ma.s.sachusetts had its own militia. Historically these companies of amateur soldiers had defended New England's settlements from attacks by Native Americans, which had climaxed a hundred years before with King Philip's War and the destruction of a third of the region's English settlements. Although that conflict remained the high-water mark of violence in New England, clashes with the Indians had persisted throughout the eighteenth century. "I have seen a vessel enter the harbor of Boston," the loyalist Peter Oliver wrote, "with a long string of hairy Indian scalps strung to the rigging, and waving in the wind." The Indians had been the New Englanders' traditional foe, but by the middle of the century the militiamen's attention had shifted.

During the French and Indian War, colonial and British soldiers had fought side by side against a common enemy. But as Oliver also observed, "Savage is a convertible term." Even before the Boston Ma.s.sacre, the anger that had once been directed toward the Indians had been transferred to the British regulars. And it wasn't just the army; the British navy, which had a history of abducting colonists for service on its warships, was also a perennial source of outrage and anxiety. In 1769 a harpoon-toting sailor on a vessel from Marblehead stabbed the leader of a British impressment gang in the neck. For a variety of reasons-not the least of which was the people's hatred of impressment-the sailor was acquitted and released. Fears of the marauding British remained so high in coastal New England that townspeople who lived within twenty miles of the sea routinely brought the same muskets to Sunday meeting that their ancestors had once used against the Indians. The colonists were still fighting for their liberties, but now it was their supposed allies, the soldiers and sailors of the British Empire, who had become the enemy.

By the end of August 1774, as the possibility of an armed conflict between the New Englanders and the British regulars became increasingly likely, attention turned to the black granular mixture of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur known as gunpowder. Notoriously difficult to manufacture, gunpowder was almost exclusively produced in Europe. a.s.suming Britain was about to ban the exportation of gunpowder to Ma.s.sachusetts (a ban that did, in fact, occur that fall), the militiamen's firearms would be rendered useless if an alternative supply were not soon found. Gage, on the other hand, could depend on a steady supply of gunpowder from Britain. It was still in his best interests, however, to acquire all available stores in the province, and both sides began a desperate rush for gunpowder.

By law, each town was allotted its own reserve of powder, which was stored in a regional magazine. In Boston, large quant.i.ties had already been taken from the powderhouse on the common as the many towns surrounding the city withdrew their reserves. For his part, Gage wanted to make sure that nothing happened to the powder that belonged to the crown and had begun to move those stocks to the security of the Castle. As part of this effort, he wrote William Brattle (who despite being a major general in the Cambridge militia was always referred to by his alliterative earlier rank as Brigadier Brattle) about the status of the reserves at a powderhouse on Quarry Hill in modern Somerville. Brattle reported that the only remaining powder at the a.r.s.enal was the 250 half-barrels belonging to the crown.

If Brattle had simply answered Gage's question, all might have remained well with the doughty brigadier. But Brattle, who like Daniel Leonard and Samuel Quincy had started out as a patriot but was now a committed loyalist, chose to relay a conversation he'd had with a militia officer from Concord. The officer, Brattle wrote, had complained of being pressured by local patriots to prepare his company "to meet at one minute's warning equipped with arms and ammunition." Brattle recounted how he'd warned the officer that to comply with this policy-which was clearly intended to hasten the militia's response to a possible incursion by British regulars-was to risk being "hanged for a rebel." Brattle ended the letter by a.s.suring Gage that "the king's powder ... shall remain [at Quarry Hill] as a sacred depositum till ordered out by the Captain General." The clear implication was that Gage should act quickly to prevent the patriots from stealing the powder.

Four days later, on Wednesday, August 31, Gage was making his way up Boston's Newbury Street toward the residence of an officer who lived in a house near the Liberty Tree. Whether it was by accident or (as John Andrews believed) by design, Brigadier Brattle's unfortunately long-winded letter slipped from the governor's pocket onto the surface of the street, where someone sympathetic to the patriot cause eventually discovered it.

Bostonians had already noticed some unusual activity among the soldiers encamped on the common. Earlier that afternoon, a group of several hundred regulars had been culled from the various regiments. After being provided with a day's provisions, the soldiers were told to be prepared to march early the next morning. "Various were the conjectures respecting their destination," John Andrews wrote, but not even the regulars knew where they were headed.

Shortly after 4:00 a.m. in the predawn darkness of Thursday, September 1, a battalion of about three hundred soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Maddison was a.s.sembled on the common and marched to Long Wharf, where a fleet of thirteen boats was waiting for them. They were soon being rowed across the harbor to the mouth of the Mystic River along the northern edge of Charlestown.

About three miles up the river, past the point where the Mystic was joined by the smaller Malden River, was Ten Hills Farm. Originally owned by Governor John Winthrop, this beautiful property had been named for the minimountain range that rose up along the Mystic River's western sh.o.r.e, providing panoramic views of the harbor from Cobble, Winter, and the highest of them all, Prospect Hill. Just a mile west from the landing at Ten Hills Farm was the Quarry Hill a.r.s.enal, where Sheriff David Phipps had eight wagons waiting to be loaded with the king's powder. Sprouting protectively from the top of the conical stone structure was one of Benjamin Franklin's lightning rods.

Gunpowder in the eighteenth century was much more volatile than it later became. Shoes with any metal on the soles that might cause a spark on the powderhouse's stone floor had to be removed, and since a flame of any kind was forbidden, the soldiers were forced to wait for daybreak, when it was light enough to begin removing the barrels and loading up the wagons. As the powder was transported to the boats waiting on the Mystic River, Sheriff Phipps led a small detachment of soldiers to Cambridge. Once they'd borrowed some horses from a local tavern keeper, they hauled off two of the province's fieldpieces and headed across the bridge at the Charles River and marched the eight miles through Roxbury to Boston. In the meantime, the rest of the regulars transported the gunpowder by boat down the Mystic River to the Castle in Boston Harbor.

By then, word of Brigadier Brattle's letter had already spread through Boston and beyond. As Gage perhaps intended, Brattle, not the governor, became the object of the people's scorn once it became known that the king's powder and some fieldpieces had been removed by several hundred British soldiers. A crowd began to a.s.semble in Cambridge and soon made its way to the group of seven magnificent homes known as Tory Row. Situated about a mile from the Cambridge Common on the road to Watertown, these houses enjoyed grand views of the Charles River. The children of the original owners had intermarried to the point that Tory Row had become one of the most exclusive, closely knit communities in America. Brigadier Brattle lived in the house closest to the common, and it's likely that even before the crowd arrived, he had mounted his horse and fled for Boston, where he quickly decided that he had no choice but to retreat all the way to the Castle.

By that afternoon and evening, the crowd in Cambridge had surrounded the house of the province's attorney general, Jonathan Sewall. Sewall had also left for Boston, but someone inside the house fired a warning shot. Some windows were broken, but for the most part the crowd, made up of "some boys and negroes," according to one account, showed little interest in pressing the matter and eventually disbanded.

At some point, however, a rumor was started: when the British soldiers arrived in Cambridge to take the powder, it was claimed, the local militia had opposed them. A skirmish ensued, and the regulars killed six militiamen.

The news of six dead militiamen astounded everyone who heard it, and by midnight the rumor had reached almost forty miles west to Worcester. Even as the rumor headed west, it spread to the north and east to New Hampshire and to Maine; it also headed south to Rhode Island and Connecticut. By early that Friday morning, virtually every town within a fifty-mile radius of Boston was in a tumult as its militiamen prepared to march to the "relief of their brethren." Soon about twenty thousand, some said as many as forty thousand, men were streaming toward Boston.

On the night of September 1 a merchant named McNeil was staying at a tavern in Shrewsbury, Ma.s.sachusetts, about thirty-eight miles from Boston. Around midnight he was awakened by a violent rapping on the tavern door. He heard the tavern keeper being told "the doleful story that the powder was taken, six men killed, and all the people between there and Boston arming and marching down to the relief of their brethren."

Within a quarter of an hour, fifty men had a.s.sembled at the tavern in Shrewsbury. Those who weren't writing messages to be sent on to towns even farther to the west were preparing their weapons and provisions. Soon they were all on their way to Boston. By the time McNeil set out that morning, the only man left in the entire town was the elderly tavern keeper.

It took most of the day for McNeil to press on to Boston. "He said he never saw such a scene before," recounted the minister Ezra Stiles, who spoke with McNeil several weeks later. "All along were armed men rushing forward, some on foot, some on horseback, at every house women and children making cartridges [paper packets of gunpowder], [casting] bullets, baking biscuit, crying and bemoaning and at the same time animating their husbands and sons to fight for their liberties, though not knowing whether they should ever see them again." Just as their ancestors had once rallied to protect their families from the Indians, this new generation of New Englanders was preparing to confront the British regulars.

Ezra Stiles asked McNeil whether any of the militiamen on the morning of September 2, 1774, "appeared to want [i.e., lack] courage." "No, nothing of this," McNeil replied, "but a firm intrepid ardor, [a] hardy, eager, and courageous spirit of enterprise, a spirit for revenging the blood of their brethren and rescu[ing] our liberties." All along the road to Boston McNeil saw women who had already armed and supplied their own men now offering handfuls of cartridges and bullets to those who continued to pa.s.s by. McNeil claimed "the women surpa.s.sed the men for eagerness and spirit in the defense of liberty by arms... . They expected a b.l.o.o.d.y scene, but they doubted not success and victory."

Throughout the morning and afternoon McNeil rode in "the midst of the people" as they made their way to Boston. Over and over again, it was "positively affirmed" that six men had been killed by the regulars. Not until he was within two miles of Cambridge did he hear the first contradictory report. Soon he was approaching a crowd of several thousand people. Instead of confusion, there was, he remembered, "an awful stillness."

Earlier that morning in Boston, Dr. Joseph Warren received word that "incredible numbers were in arms, and lined the roads from Sudbury to Cambridge." Warren had taken over from Samuel Adams as leader of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, and citizens in both Charlestown and Cambridge asked that he do something "to prevent the people from coming to immediate acts of violence."

This was a different kind of role for the committee, whose previous activities had been limited to the written word. Warren was now needed, not as a writer, but as a mediator in what sounded like a highly volatile situation. As it turned out, this was just the leadership role to which Warren's talents were suited.

Whereas Samuel Adams was part political boss, part ideologue, Warren, close to two decades younger, possessed a swashbuckling personal magnetism. He'd been born in the nearby town of Roxbury, just across from Boston Neck, and as a boy he was often seen wandering the streets of Boston, selling milk from the family farm. The eldest of four brothers, Warren was recognized as an unusually gifted boy, and when he was fourteen he began his studies at Harvard. In the fall of that year his father was picking apples from the top of a tall ladder when he fell and broke his neck. Warren's youngest brother, John, had been just two years old at the time of this tragic event, and one of his first memories was of watching his father's lifeless body being carried away. With the financial help of family friends, Warren was able to continue at Harvard and later served as a kind of surrogate parent for his brothers, particularly for John, who had recently finished his medical apprenticeship with Warren and was now a doctor in Salem.

At Harvard, Warren's talent for pursuing a dizzying variety of extracurricular activities was soon evident. Early on, he staged several performances of the popular politically themed play Cato in his dorm room. The French and Indian War was then in full swing, and he joined the college's militia company. A cla.s.smate later told the story of how Warren responded to being locked out of a meeting of fellow students in an upper-story dormitory room. Instead of pounding at the door, he made his way to the building's roof, shimmied down a rainspout, and climbed in through an open window. Just as he was making his entrance, the rotted spout collapsed to the ground with a spectacular crash. Warren simply shrugged and commented that the spout had served its purpose. For a boy who had lost his father to a fatal fall, it was an ill.u.s.trative bit of bravado. This was a young man who dared to do what should have, by all rights, terrified him.

It was at Harvard that Warren showed an interest in medicine. The great challenge for medical students in the eighteenth century was finding human cadavers for dissection. It's likely that Warren was a member of the s.p.u.n.kers: a club of medical students (of which we know his younger brother John and Warren's apprentice William Eustis were members) who regularly raided graveyards, jails, and poorhouses in search of bodies. Illegal, yet all in the name of a higher good, this grisly game of capture the corpse was the perfect training ground for a future revolutionary.

In 1764 an epidemic of smallpox ravaged Boston. Warren, just twenty-three and a new doctor, served on a team of physicians that inoculated approximately five thousand people-a third of the entire population of Boston-who'd been quarantined on Castle William. Over an intense three-month period, Warren treated John Adams, the children of Thomas Hutchinson, the customs agent Benjamin Hallowell, the province's secretary, Thomas Flucker, John Singleton Copley's father-in-law, Richard Clarke, along with a host of the town's poor, prost.i.tutes, slaves, and sailors.

Around this time, Warren burst on the political scene with several controversial newspaper articles about then governor Francis Bernard. Although Warren always looked to Samuel Adams for guidance, he quickly established his own ident.i.ty as a political leader, becoming in 1772 the moving spirit behind the North End Caucus, a group quietly organized to handpick the candidates for key positions in town and provincial government. Warren had that rarest of talents: the ability to influence the course of events without appearing to a.s.sert his own will-what one contemporary described as "the wisdom to guide and the power to charm." There were other patriot leaders who believed they were calling the shots, another contemporary later remembered, but it was really Warren through the North End Caucus-an organization that most Bostonians didn't even know existed-who controlled "the secret springs that moved the great wheels."

Warren's influence extended to the St. Andrew's Lodge of Masons, the society that came to serve as the clandestine nerve center of the patriot cause. Warren was the lodge's grand master and presided over meetings at the Green Dragon Tavern on upper Union Street near the Mill Pond in the North End, where, it was claimed, the details of the Boston Tea Party had been worked out in December 1773. In the fall and winter to come, the Green Dragon was where Paul Revere and other lodge members oversaw the surveillance of the British troops, yet another patriot activity in which Warren was deeply involved. Whether it was as leader of the St. Andrew's Masonic Lodge, the North End Caucus, or now the Boston Committee of Correspondence, Warren had become one of the most influential patriot leaders in Boston.

On the morning of Friday, September 2, 1774, with thousands of militiamen gathering on the other side of the Charles River in Cambridge, he sent out a messenger to notify his fellow Boston Committee of Correspondence members that he needed them for an impromptu meeting. So as to prevent a possible panic in the occupied city, he chose not to inform the messenger of the reason for the meeting. As a consequence, committee members were in no great rush to attend to Warren's summons, and once only a handful of members had a.s.sembled, Warren and his a.s.sociates left for Cambridge.

Instead of taking the longer land route through Roxbury, as Brigadier Brattle had done the previous afternoon, they made their way to Hudson's Point in Boston's North End, where they took the ferry to Charlestown, less than half a mile away. From there it was just four miles on a road that after pa.s.sing Breed's and Bunker's Hills on the right and Charlestown's Mill Pond on the left, skirted the edge of Charlestown Common (where the gibbeted remains of the slave Mark had once hung in chains) and headed west to Cambridge.

They found about four thousand people-almost three times Cambridge's entire population-gathered in the large open field that served as the town's common. Once the farmers heard that the rumors about the six dead militiamen were false, they had agreed to leave their weapons in Watertown before proceeding to Cambridge. With no regulars to fight, they turned their attention to making sure Cambridge's mandamus councillors renounced their posts. At that moment, all eyes were turned to the steps of the courthouse, where two of the councillors stood in the hot summer sun. One of these was the physician and alchemist Samuel Danforth, who previously claimed to have discovered the secret to immortality known as the philosopher's stone. The discovery had apparently not enabled the seventy-eight-year-old councillor to speak in anything other than a barely audible rasp, and Warren's fellow committee member Thomas Young marveled that "not a whisper interrupted the low voice of that feeble old man from being heard by the whole body." Judge Joseph Lee also renounced his position as mandamus councillor and later remarked that "he never saw so large a number of people together and preserve so peaceable order before in his life." But the quiet was not to last.

Around noon, a gentleman in a chaise came upon the crowd gathered on the Cambridge Common. He was on his way from Salem to Boston, and since the road along the common was filled with people, he was forced to pause before continuing on to the bridge across the Charles River. This happened to be Benjamin Hallowell, fifty-four, a member of the customs board who was almost as despised as former governor Thomas Hutchinson. Hallowell had insisted, it was said, that ships with provisions for Boston's poor be banned from entering the harbor, even though the Port Act did not technically forbid them to. In his youth he'd been a noted privateer captain and had acc.u.mulated enough prize money during the French and Indian War that he'd built a big and sumptuous house on Hanover Street. He'd married into the well-to-do Boylston family, and as his role as customs officer made it dangerous to live in Boston, his wife Mary used some of her inheritance to purchase a house in the portion of Roxbury known as Jamaica Plain. Brash and hotheaded (John Adams described him as a "Hotspur"), he believed it was time Gage used the regulars to teach these seditious people a lesson. But even Hallowell seems to have been taken aback by the prospect of pa.s.sing through a crowd of four thousand patriot militiamen.

He soon realized that these were mostly farmers from the outlying country towns and therefore unaware of his reputation in Boston. He became hopeful of making it to the river without incident. But then someone recognized him.

Isaiah Thomas, the patriot writer and editor who in June had published the poem attributed to Mercy Scollay, was in Cambridge that day. According to Hallowell, Thomas cried out, "d.a.m.n you, how do you like us now, you Tory son of a b.i.t.c.h" as he made it known to anyone who would listen that Hallowell was "an enemy to the country." Soon about 160 men on horseback were on his trail, "having taken," Hallowell wrote, "a resolution to destroy me."

Joseph Warren and his fellow committee members realized that the pursuit of Hallowell could very well ruin what had so far been an exemplary demonstration of the people's "patience, temperance, and fort.i.tude." Thomas Young and others jumped on their own horses and did their best to dissuade those at the head of the posse that "the shedding of one man's blood would answer no good purpose." Most of the riders gave up the chase, but a group of eight or ten refused to turn back.

Hallowell had succeeded in crossing the Charles and putting about three miles between him and Cambridge when the group of enraged hors.e.m.e.n caught up to him and his black servant, who was following the chaise on a horse. A man named Bradshaw was in the lead and told him to stop so that he could speak with him. When Hallowell refused, Bradshaw rode up beside the horse that was pulling the chaise and began to beat the animal over the head as he tried to grab its reins. By this time, Hallowell had a pistol in his hand, and whenever Bradshaw or the others approached, he aimed the weapon at them till they moved away. Bradshaw later claimed that at one point Hallowell even pulled the trigger, but the pistol failed to fire.

The road to Boston took them through several different villages in Roxbury, and Bradshaw kept repeating the cry, "Stop the murderer, the Tory murderer, he has killed a man!" "This hue and cry," Hallowell wrote, "occasioned a sallying forth of the people from the houses ... ; others upon the road joined in the cry-all endeavoring to stop me."

After about a mile of this frenzy, the horse pulling the chaise began to give out. Hallowell ordered his servant to give him his saddled horse, which turned out to be "a fleet one," and after tying the reins together and dropping them on the horse's neck, Hallowell continued on with a pistol in each hand. By the time he approached Boston Neck, he estimated that he was surrounded by about a hundred people, "all endeavoring to seize me," as he "ran the gauntlet" toward the town gate. Just as he reached the guard at the entrance, his horse began to fail. Hallowell leaped to the ground and ran the rest of the way into Boston.

The city was soon alive with rumors of its own. The country people, it was said, planned to "fling in about 15,000 by the way of the Neck, and as many more over the ferry." Once the provincials secured a foothold in the city, they would, John Andrews reported, "come in like locusts and rid the town of every soldier."

Gage placed a guard at the powderhouse on the common; he also doubled the guard on the Neck while dispatching soldiers dressed as sailors to gain intelligence of what was really happening across the river in Cambridge. To his credit, he did not send any armed regulars. "Had the troops marched only five miles out of Boston," Joseph Warren wrote, "I doubt whether a man would have been saved of their whole number."

The hurly-burly with Hallowell also had an inevitable effect on the country people gathered in Cambridge. Antic.i.p.ating a possible attack by the regulars, some of them rushed back to Watertown to retrieve their muskets and swords. Soon they were converging on the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver. It was time to make the magistrate admit the full magnitude of his sins against the people.

Oliver, forty, had been born in Antigua, where the family's sugar plantation helped fund the huge mansion called Elmwood he had built at the end of Tory Row. Up until his recent appointment to lieutenant governor, Oliver had steered clear of politics and was well respected throughout the province. Even the notorious patriot firebrand Josiah Quincy Jr. counted him as a friend, and if not for Gage's impatient insistence that he accept the posts, Oliver would have declined the appointments to both the lieutenant governorship and the governor's council. The patriots weren't angered that he'd accepted his position as lieutenant governor; it was that he had agreed to serve as a mandamus councillor. Just as Lee and Danforth had been forced to disavow their commissions, Lieutenant Governor Oliver must resign as a mandamus councillor.

Earlier in the day, Oliver had succeeded in convincing the crowd gathered around his house that it would be in their best interests if he traveled to Boston, spoke with Governor Gage, and reported back to them later in the day. True to his word, he had returned to his house on Tory Row. However, as Gage had predicted, it now looked as if he was about to fall into "the snare." The people were becoming "unmanageable," and Oliver, perhaps remembering what had happened to the house of former Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, decided that he had better get himself back to Boston. He had just climbed into his carriage when "a vast crowd advanced and in a short time my house was surrounded by 4,000 people, and one-quarter of them in arms." He retreated back into his house, unsure of what to do next.

Oliver reluctantly agreed to allow Warren and four other members of the Boston Committee of Correspondence inside his house, where they informed him that they had been delegated to "demand my resignation as councillor." Oliver refused. In the meantime, people began to "press up to my windows," Oliver wrote, "calling for vengeance." He could hear his wife and children crying in the next room. "I cast about to find some means of preserving my reputation," he wrote to Lord Dartmouth, and "proposed that the people should take me by force." The committee advised against it, and Oliver finally scribbled on the resignation letter they thrust before him, "My house being surrounded by 4,000 people, in compliance with their commands I sign my name Thomas Oliver."

McNeil, the trader from Connecticut who had spent the previous night in Shrewsbury, watched as Oliver's signed declaration was "handed along the lines and read publicly at proper distances till the whole body of the people were made to hear it." Soon, McNeil recalled, "the solemn silence" was replaced by "a cheerful murmur or general universal voice of joy." It was about six in the evening, an hour before sunset, and as the people scattered in various directions, the thunder rolled and it began to rain.

That what came to be called the Powder Alarm did not live up to the rumors it inspired stands as a tribute to Warren's ability to mediate a most challenging and potentially explosive situation as well as to the steadiness of the country people who traveled to Cambridge on that Friday in September 1774. Their refusal to indulge in violence, and the almost surreal sense of courtesy that underlay that resolve, speaks to the complexity of the emotions that the events of the past spring and summer had evoked among them. At least at this stage, they were not willing to fire the first shot.