Who fought: Americans (William Prescott) vs. British (William Howe).
What was at stake I American independence.
As the sun rose over Boston Harbor, an officer on the HMS Lively noticed something strange on the hill behind Charlestown. He trained his telescope on the hill. The damned rebels were building a fort. In fact, it was almost completed. The officer immediately informed his captain, who opened fire on the rebel position. But a few minutes later, Lively received an order from Adm.Samuel Graves to cease fire.In his headquarters in Boston, Lt. Gen. Thomas Gage, too, was aware of the fort. This was absolutely intolerable. Gage had spent most of his life in North America, fighting for the king. He had married a New Jersey woman and planned to retire to a country house he had purchased in New York. This ragtag band of peasants, led by the most improper young radicals, was trying to plunge his country into anarchy. Gage had already requested reinforcements to help him deal with the situation. He got 3,000 additional soldiers, bringing the British forces in Boston to 5,000.
London felt that this number would be adequate to handle dissidents in a town of 20,000. Gage did not. He also got less welcome reinforcements—three new major generals, Henry Clinton, John "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne, and William Howe, three of the most ambitious officers in the service. Each of them, Gage knew, coveted his command.Through his efficient intelligence organization, which included spies in the high-est rebel councils, Gage knew that the dissidents had been hoarding ammunition and weapons, even cannons.
He had sent a force composed of the flank companies—the grenadiers and the light infantry, the army's elite—to confiscate those stores at Con-cord. But the rebels had spies, too. The stores were gone. What the troops found at Concord was a horde of armed farmers who drove them all the way back to Charles-town. The rebels fired at the troops from houses and from behind stone walls. There seemed to be thousands of them. The fight must have convinced them that they were the equals of British regulars. After the fight, they besieged Boston. Now they were building a fort on Breed's Hill, as if they were real soldiers.
But they'd run like rabbits when they had to face attacking regulars, Gage thought.Meanwhile, he wanted to give the rebels an immediate reaction to the fort they had built overnight. He called his new staff generals together. Burgoyne was a writer, a playwright. He told Gentleman Johnny to draft a message to Graves, asking the admiral to resume the cannonade of the rebel fort. It had to be persuasive. Graves, a senior member of Britain's "senior service," would never take orders from an army man, even though the task of obliterating the fort would be the army's. Besides, Graves still bore a grudge against Gage because of a dispute he had had with the general's father years before. After the note to Graves had been sent, Gage wanted to hear how his generals thought they should handle the fort.
Rabble in arms
If Gage could have visited the rebel encampments, the numbers he saw would have troubled him. Militias from all over New England were there, as well as troops from the Middle Colonies and even from the South. But he would have been heartened by the confusion. Artemas Ward, commander of the Massachusetts militia, was nominally in command under the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. But militia officers were all throwing their weight around.
Gen. Israel Putnam of Connecticut, who had commanded troops in the French and Indian War, was particularly pushy.The Americans had fortified positions at the entrances to Boston and Charles-town. Those two towns occupied a pair of twin peninsulas, almost islands, projecting like huge pollywogs into the harbor. (In those days, the Back Bay section of Boston really was a bay.) Each peninsula was linked to the mainland by a narrow, flat neck. There were no troops permanently in Charlestown. Putnam proposed fortifying Bunker Hill, the highest point on the Charlestown peninsula. This would prevent the British troops from using Charlestown as a staging area, as they had before the raid on Concord.
It could also close most of Boston Harbor.Other militia generals protested that the hill would be too easy to isolate, given the Royal Navy's absolute control of the harbor. But nobody could stop Putnam from leading troops into the peninsula under cover of night. On the other hand, nobody made any arrangements for relief of the troops who would do the digging or even for supplying them with water, food, and ammunition. With Putnam went Col. William Prescott of Massachusetts, Col. Richard Gridley, a trained military engineer, and 1,200 armed farmers, who would do the digging.When they got to the top of Bunker Hill, they decided it would be better to fortify Breed's Hill—lower, but steeper, and closer to the British.
Gridley traced the outlines of a fort, and Putnam ordered his men to dig. The fort was to be an earth-work 130 feet square with 12-foot walls rising from a dry moat.Prescott, who would have the field command on Breed's Hill, had his men start fortifying the flanks of the fort. They threw up breastworks down the Mystic River side of the hill and into woods bordered by a swamp. On the other side of the peninsula, the waters of Boston Harbor were too far away to permit building fortifications down to the beach. Prescott sent a detachment into the village of Charlestown.
By sniping from the houses they might delay a British sweep. There was still a gap beyond the woods on the left. Prescott sent Capt. Thomas Knowlton with some Connecticut militia to plug it. They dug in behind a rail fence with a stone foundation. Below the bluffs above the Mystic shore, Col. John Stark and two regiments of New Hampshire militia took over the end of the fence and built a stone wall that ran across the beach into the river.Work on the fortifications was briefly interrupted when Lively began shooting, but it continued after the cease-fire. Then the whole fleet opened fire, as well as army cannons across the bay.
The naval guns were not designed to fire on hilltop forts at close range. Most of their shots were too low. The digging continued. A soldier named Asa Pollard went down the hill to get water. As he was returning, his head suddenly disappeared, and a geyser of blood erupted from his neck. A cannon ball had decapitated him. The Americans took cover. But Prescott got up on a parapet and walked up and down as he ordered the troops to continue digging.Prescott noticed a nattily dressed young man coming up for the rear. As he came closer, the colonel recognized Dr. Joseph Warren, chairman of the Committee of Safety and president of the Provincial Congress.
Warren had just been named a major general. Prescott offered him the command."I shall take no command here," Warren said. "I came as a volunteer with my musket to serve under you."
The attack
At British headquarters, Henry Clinton had a suggestion. Clinton, born in Newfound land, raised in New York, and blooded on Europe's battlefields, proposed landing on Charlestown Neck. It was a strip only 35 yards wide, and doing so would cut the rebels off.Gage snorted that there was no need for subtlety. The rebels would run when face-to-face with real troops on the offensive. That would be a greater blow to their morale.William Howe opposed both plans. Howe was the brother of Lord Augustus Howe, the inventor and master of light infantry tactics. James Wolfe, the conqueror of Quebec, considered William Howe the most daring and brilliant young officer in the army. Howe had led Wolfe's assault on the Plains of Abraham.
Howe pointed out that troops landing on the swampy neck, where there was no cover, would be caught between rebels to the north and rebels to the south, both on high ground. The tides permitted landing and evacuation at limited times of the day, and then only at a spot a half-mile from the neck. Howe proposed landing at Moulton's point, east of Charlestown, in front of Breed's Hill. It would not be a simple frontal assault, however. One detachment, under Brig. Gen. Robert Pigot, would enter Charlestown Village and march on the fort. Pigot would not attack.
He would just hold the rebels in place while the rest of the army delivered the knockout punch. Howe, leading the grenadiers—18th-century shock troops—and battalion companies, would attack the hastily dug fortifications on the Mystic River side of the fort. But the light infantry, Howe's favorite arm, would deliver the keystroke. The light infantry, wiry men picked for their agility and trained to think for themselves, would jog up the Mystic Rver beach, hidden by the bluffs, and turn the rebels' flank.
They would then attack the rebels behind the breastworks just as the grenadiers and battalion companies were about to charge.After landing, Pigot's detachment came under sniper fire. Pigot asked for artillery support. The British ships responded by firing hot shots (cannon balls heated red hot), and carcasses (hollow shot filled with a flaming mixture of tow and tar), into the town. The village was soon a roaring furnace. Pigot led his troops around the town and up toward the fort. On the British right, Howe mustered his troops in three waves."I shall not desire any one of you to go a step farther than where I go myself at your head," he told them.
He meant it.Behind the breastworks, the slowness of the British advance and the silence of the British field pieces puzzled the Americans. The advance was slow because the Redcoats were plowing through deep grass that hid stone walls and ditches. The field pieces were silent because they were six-pounders and they had been supplied with 12-pound shot.Hidden from both the Americans behind the breastworks and the British main body were the light infantrymen. There was nothing slow about their advance.
They were double-timing up the beach four abreast toward what looked like a deserted stone wall. The light company of the Royal Welch Fusiliers led the column.When the Welshmen were 100 feet from the wall, there was a deafening blast and a cloud of smoke. The light company of the Royal Welch Fusiliers ceased to exist. The King's Own light infantry, behind the Royal Welch, slowed for fraction of a second, then leveled their bayonets and charged before the rebels could reload. They leaped over the bodies of their comrades and were yelling in fury as a second volley blasted them.
No soldiers could reload that fast. The light company of the 10th Infantry paused. There was a third volley. The whole light infantry column stampeded to the rear.
Behind the wall, John Stark cast a baleful eye over his three lines of prone militia-men, dampening any desire to pursue the enemy or even cheer. "Reload and wait," he said.If the fourth company had continued to charge, the battle would have been over. All of this was hidden from the men following Howe. The grenadiers, the first wave, fired a volley at the silent breastworks when they were 80 yards away and charged at double-time. They had covered about 30 yards when rebel heads and musket muzzles appeared above the earth wall. There was an ear-splitting crash and a cloud of white smoke. Howe looked around. Instead of a line behind him, there were clumps of men and individuals standing alone. The survivors fired back but hit nothing but dirt. The rebels fired again. The grenadiers headed down the hill. The battalion companies in the second wave marched through them and fired.
They hit nothing. The rebels began firing as fast as they could."An incessant stream of fire poured from the rebel lines," a British officer wrote later. "It seemed a continuous sheet of fire for near 30 minutes."Howe screamed at his troops and waved his sword, but the British troops ran to the rear.
Pigot's troops, as they neared the fort, had the same experience."General Burgoyne and I saw appearances on the left of the army which made us shudder," Clinton wrote after watching the action from Copp's Hill in Boston. "In short, it gave way." Clinton rounded up reserves and took them across the bay. Once there, he formed up the walking wounded into another unit.Howe was not about to let Clinton steal a victory from him. He and Pigot reorganized their troops, light infantry, grenadiers, and battalion companies together, and took them up the hill 15 minutes after the repulse. There was no subtlety this time. It was a simple frontal assault against an entrenched enemy. It was a simple bloodbath. The Redcoats were again repulsed.
On the hill, most of the rebels had been without sleep or food since the previous night. Now they were running out of ammunition.For his third assault, Howe organized the troops into deep columns so that a whole line would not be exposed to fire at the same time. As soon as the British were in range, the Americans opened fire. The rebels fired until their ammunition gave out. Some fired pebbles and nails in place of bullets. The British swept over the fort, but the rabble militia did not stampede.
The rebel retreat, wrote Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, was "no flight: it was even covered with bravery and military skill."Out of the 1,800 Americans who saw action, 449 were killed or wounded. One was Dr. Joseph Warren, slain in the last few minutes of the fight. The British losses were 1,060 killed or wounded out of 2,600."A dear bought victory," Henry Clinton commented. "Another such would have ruined us."Another such was not needed. The British had gained an unimportant hill. The Americans had gained confidence. At Concord, they had intimidated the British by their numbers, but their shooting was remarkably poor.
They were nervous because they were committing treason and were firing on what was probably the best army in the world. At Bunker Hill, they stood up to a superior British force and beat them back until they ran out of ammunition.If the Americans decided to resist, the British faced a hopeless situation. The colonies were a land mass 1,000 miles wide and 1,000 miles deep. The population was a quarter of that of Britain and Ireland combined, and it was largely self-sufficient. There was no vital center, although Philadelphia was the second-largest English-speaking city in the world. It was across 3,000 miles of ocean. In short, it was too big to be conquered by any forces available in the 18th century.
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