To Jane, for forty years

The hour is fast approaching on which the honor and success of this army and the safety of our bleeding country depend. Remember, officers and soldiers, that you are freemen, fighting for the blessings of liberty.

—George Washington, General Orders, August 23, 1776

Maps

1. The British Empire, 1775

2. The North American Theater, April 1775–January 1777

3. Boston, Spring 1775

4. March to Concord, April 18–19, 1775

5. British Retreat from Concord, April 19, 1775

6. Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775

7. Invasion of Canada, September–November 1775

8. Great Bridge and the Burning of Norfolk, December 1775–January 1776

9. Disaster at Quebec, December 31, 1775

10. Siege of Boston, Winter 1775–1776

11. Skirmish at Moore’s Creek Bridge, February 27, 1776

12. Retreat from Canada, May–June 1776

13. Greater New York, Summer 1776

14. New York City, Summer 1776

15. Battle of Sullivan’s Island, June 28, 1776

16. Battle of Long Island, August 22–30, 1776

17. Battle of Kip’s Bay and Harlem Heights, September 15–16, 1776

18. Battle for Lake Champlain, October 1776

19. Battle for Westchester County, October 1776

20. Attacks on Fort Washington and Fort Lee, November 16–20, 1776

21. Franklin in France, December 1776

22. Retreat Across New Jersey, November–December 1776

23. First Battle of Trenton, December 25–26, 1776

24. Second Battle of Trenton and Battle of Princeton, January 2–3, 1777

Illustrations
FIRST INSERT

1. Johan Joseph Zoffany, George III, oil on canvas, 1771. (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018)

2. John Clevely, George III Reviewing the Fleet at Spithead, 22 June 1773, watercolor, 1773. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

3. John Russell, Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford, oil on canvas, c. 1765-68. (Private collection/Bridgeman Images)

4. Nathaniel Hone I, William Legge (1731–1801), Second Earl of Dartmouth, oil on canvas, 1777. (Courtesy of Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Gift of Earle W. Newton, P.960.100)

5. Jan Josef Horemans II, Tea Time, oil on canvas, second half of eighteenth century.

6. John Collet, Scene in a London Street, oil on canvas, 1770. (Courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

7. Christian Schussele, Franklin before the Lords’ Council, Whitehall Chapel, London, 1774, engraved by Robert Whitechurch, c. 1859. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

8. Rudolf Ackermann et al, House of Commons from Microcosm of London, 1808–10. (Courtesy British Library)

9. Johan Joseph Zoffany, George III, Queen Charlotte, and Their Six Eldest Children, oil on canvas, 1770. (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018)

10. Gold State Coach, gilded and painted wood, leather, 1762. (Photograph, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018)

11. Thomas Bowles, A View of St. James’s Palace Pall Mall, engraving, 1771. (Courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

12. John Singleton Copley, General Thomas Gage, oil on canvas, c. 1768. (Courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

13. John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Thomas Gage, oil on canvas, 1771. (Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art)

14. John Trumbull, Benjamin Franklin, oil on wood, 1778. (Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery)

15. John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere, oil on canvas, 1768. (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

16. John Singleton Copley, Joseph Warren, (unfinished), oil on canvas, c. 1772. (Courtesy National Park Service, Adams National Historical Park)

17. Thomas Sully, after Charles Willson Peale. Major General Artemas Ward, oil on canvas, c. 1830-40. (Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society)

18. Dominique C. Fabronius, Maj. Gen. Israel Putnam. “He dared to lead where any dared to follow,” lithograph, c. 1864. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

19. John Stark, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

20. Gilbert Stuart, Hugh Percy, Second Duke of Northumberland, oil on canvas, c. 1788. (Courtesy High Museum of Art, Atlanta)

21. Amos Doolittle, A View of the Town of Concord, plate II, engraving, Dec. 1775, reprint by Charles E. Goodspeed, 1903.

22. Henry A. Thomas, The Battle at Bunker’s Hill, lithograph, c. 1875. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

23. Charles Willson Peale, George Washington, oil on canvas, 1776. (Courtesy Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund)

24. Charles Peale Polk, copy after Charles Willson Peale, Henry Knox, oil on canvas, after 1783. (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

25. Washington’s Headquarters, Cambridge, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

26. Nathaniel Hone, George Sackville Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville, oval portrait, 1760. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

27. Joshua Reynolds, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, oil on canvas, 1765. (National Galleries Scotland)

28. H. B. Hall after John Trumbull, Benedict Arnold, engraving, published after 1879. (Courtesy National Archives, 532921)

29. Ph. Schuyler, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

30. Alonzo Chappel, Richd. Montgomery, engraving by George R. Hall, 1881. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

31. Eyving H. de Dirkine Holmfield, Guy Carleton, oil on canvas, c. 1895. (© Château Ramezay, Historic Site and Museum of Montréal)

32. Quebec in 1775, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

33. John Trumbull, The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, December 31, 1775, oil on canvas, 1786. (Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery)

34. Château Ramezay, artist and date unknown. (© Château Ramezay, Historic Site and Museum of Montréal)

35. James Peale, Horatio Gates, oil on canvas, copy after Charles Willson Peale, 1782. (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

36. Gen. Sir William Howe, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

37. John Burgoyne, date unknown. (Courtesy National Archives, 532920)

38. Michael Angelo Wageman, Genl. Howe Evacuating Boston, engraving by John Godfrey, 1861. (Courtesy Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library)

SECOND INSERT

39. John Singleton Copley, Admiral Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe, oil on canvas, 1794. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection)

40. Archibald Robertson, View of the Narrows between Long Island & Staten Island with our fleet at anchor, etc., ink and wash on paper, 1776. (Courtesy New York Public Library, Spencer Collection)

41. Allan Ramsay, Flora Macdonald, oil on canvas, 1749. (Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology, University of Oxford)

42. Sir Henry Clinton, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

43. Gen. Lord Cornwallis, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

44. Major Gen.l Charles Lee, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

45. Charles Willson Peale, William Moultrie, oil on canvas, 1782. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Transfer from the National Gallery of Art, gift of the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, 1942)

46. Slave auction notice, 1760. (“The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas,” website for Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Original source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-10293)

47. Thomas Leitch, A view of Charles-Town, the capital of South Carolina, engraved by Samuel Smith, 1776. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

48. Nicholas Pocock, A View of the Attack Made by the British Fleet under the Command of Sir Peter Parker, etc., oil on canvas, 1783. (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina)

49. Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq, The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, July 4, 1776, oil on canvas, c. 1873.

50. Laurent Dabos, Thomas Paine, oil on canvas, c. 1792. (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

51. James Wallace and Dominic Serres, The Phoenix and the Rose engaged by the enemy’s fire ships and galleys on the 16 Augst. 1776, engraving, 1778. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

52. Alonzo Chappel, Battle of Long Island, oil on canvas, 1858. (Brooklyn Historical Society)

53. Bushnell’s American Turtle, engraving, 1881. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

54. Thomas Mitchell, Forcing a passage of the Hudson River, 9 October 1776, oil on canvas, date unknown, copy of original by Dominic Serres the Elder. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

55. Robert Cleveley, The British landing at Kip’s Bay, New York Island, 15 September 1776, pen and ink, black and watercolor, 1777. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

56. The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

57. Charles Willson Peale, Nathanael Greene, watercolor on ivory, 1778. (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924)

58. Luther G. Hayward, Colonel Roger Morris’ House, 1854. (© The Morris-Jumel Mansion, gift of Lydia Malbin)

59. John Trumbull, General John Glover, graphite, 1794. (Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery)

60. William Glanville Evelyn, frontispiece portrait, artist unknown, 1775. (From G. D. Scull, ed., Memoirs and Letters of Captain W. Glanville Evelyn, 1879)

61. Thomas Davies, The landing of the British forces in the Jerseys on the 20th of November 1776, etc., watercolor, 1776. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

62. Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, oil on canvas, 1755. (ART Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo)

63. Jean-Baptiste Raguenet, A View of Paris from the Pont Neuf, oil on canvas, 1763. (Courtesy Getty Center, Open Content Program, J. Paul Getty Museum)

64. Silas Deane, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

65. Joseph Duplessis, Portrait of Louis XVI, King of France and Navarre, oil on canvas, c. 1776-78.

66. Antoine-François Callet, Charles Gravier Comte de Vergennes, engraving by Vincenzio Vangelisti, c. 1774–89. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

67. Charles Willson Peale, Dr. Benjamin Rush, oil on canvas, 1783–86. (Winterthur Museum, gift of Mrs. Julia B. Henry)

68. Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, oil on canvas, 1819. (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; gift of the Owners of the Old Boston Museum)

69. John Sullivan, wood engraving, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

70. Brig. Gen. Joseph Reed, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

71. John Trumbull, The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776, oil on canvas, 1786–1828. (Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery)

72. “Plan of Princeton, Dec. 31, 1776,” manuscript map, pen and ink. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

73. Major Gen. James Grant, Colonel of the 55th Foot, date unknown. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

74. John Trumbull, Gen. Hugh Mercer, copy of an original pencil sketch created in 1791. (Courtesy Print Collection, New York Public Library)

75. John Trumbull, Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, sketch for The Battle of Princeton, pen and ink wash, 1786. (Courtesy Battle of Princeton Prints Collection, GC047, Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

76. James Peale, The Battle of Princeton, oil on canvas, c. 1782. (Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, NY)

Prologue
ENGLAND, JUNE 1773–MARCH 1775
Inspecting the Fleet

At three-thirty a.m. on June 22, 1773, fifteen minutes before sunrise, a royal chaise pulled by four matched horses burst from the gates of Kew Palace, escorted by cavalry outriders in scarlet coats. South they rode, skirting the Thames valley west of London before rattling onto the Surrey downs. Pearly light seeped into the landscape, and the brilliant green of an English summer day—the first full day following the solstice—emerged from the fens and fields. Even at this early hour the roads were crowded, for all England knew that a great review was planned at the royal dockyards in Portsmouth, a four-day celebration of the fleet that a decade before had crushed France and Spain in the Seven Years’ War to give rise to the British Empire. An exasperated message to the Admiralty headquarters in London earlier this week had warned of “it being almost impossible to get horses on the road owing to the multitude of people going to Portsmouth.” That throng, according to a newspaper account, included “admirals, captains, and honest Jack Tars in abundance … courtiers and parasites, placemen and pensioners, pimps and prostitutes, gamblers and pickpockets.” Innkeepers on the south coast were said to demand ten guineas a night for a bed.

The king himself, a demon for details, had choreographed this seven-hour journey from Kew, arranging the postilions, footmen, and grooms like chess pieces. He had calculated the distance and duration of each leg along the sixty-three-mile route, writing memoranda in his looping, legible hand, adorned only with a delicate filigree of ink that rose from each final lowercase d—as in “God”—to snake back across the paper like a fly fisherman’s line. Nine relays of horses waited along the route in places called Ripley and Godalming, but none at Lotheby Manor on the Portsmouth road, perhaps because an ancient English custom required that if a monarch visited Lotheby, the lord of the manor was “to present His Majesty with three whores.” Or so the London Chronicle claimed.

Bells pealed in welcome as the cavalcade rolled into Hampshire. Country folk stood before their rude cottages, some in farm frocks and red cloaks, some in their Sunday finery, though it was Tuesday. All strained for a glimpse of the man who sat alone with his thoughts in the chaise: George William Frederick, or, as he had been proclaimed officially upon ascending the throne in 1760, “George III, by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith, and so forth.” (The claim to France was a bit of nostalgia dating to the fourteenth century.) Below Petersfield, the crowds thickened, spilling along the chalky ridges above the roadbed, and when George emerged from his carriage for a five-minute pause at Portsdown Hill, five thousand people bayed their approval while he admired the vista of the harbor below and the sapphire anchorage that stretched across to the Isle of Wight.

Half an hour later, a royal salute of twenty-one guns sounded from Portsea Bridge. Just after ten a.m. the White Boys, local burghers dressed entirely in white, cleared a lane for the king’s chaise through the throng at Landport Gate. More salutes greeted him, including a triple discharge from 232 guns on Portsmouth’s ramparts in a mighty cannonade heard sixty miles away. When the jubilant crowd pressed close, soldiers from the 20th Regiment prodded them back with bayonets until George urged caution. “My people,” he said, “will not hurt me.”

Most of his cabinet ministers had traveled from London, along with Privy Council members and a royal household contingent of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, who had been advised to bring ample spirits of lavender to calm the jittery. Dense ranks of army and navy officers, along with Portsmouth’s better sort, jammed a public levee at the Governor’s House in hopes of kissing the king’s hand. A prayer that “the fleet may ever prove victorious” was followed by a recitation of “The Wooden Walls of England,” a new, four-stanza tribute to the navy: “Hail, happy isle!… Spread then thy sails where naval glory calls, / Britain’s best bulwarks are her wooden walls.”

Then it was off to see those wooden walls. At one-thirty p.m., draped in a crimson boat cloak adorned with an enormous star of the Order of the Garter, George stepped aboard his ten-oar barge for the three-mile trip to Spithead anchorage. A flotilla trailed in his wake, filled to the gunwales with nobility, gentry, and sea dogs in blue and braid; the procession included the venerable Fubbs—the word was slang for chubby—a yacht named for a favorite mistress of Charles II’s. A gentle June breeze riffled the sea, and in the clear sunshine five hundred vessels large and small could be seen all around: brigs, corvettes, wherries, schooners, frigates, sloops.

Most imposing were twenty ships of the line moored in two facing ranks along five miles of roadstead. Each wore new paint, their bowsprits steeved at a pugnacious tilt of thirty-six degrees above the horizon, their sterns boasting names like Royal Oak, Centaur, Terrible, and Triumph. Some six thousand crewmen crowded their decks, and as the king drew near, fourteen hundred guns opened in another thunderous salute, salvo upon salvo. At last the cannonade stopped, the great gouts of smoke drifted off, and each vessel hoisted its colors, a bright riot of pendants and banners; four hundred flags fluttered from Kent alone. Spectators lined the walls in Portsmouth and along the promenade in adjacent Gosport, where alehouse keepers had erected canvas booths to sell fried sausages and shilling lumps of veal and ham. Now the crowds pressed to the water’s edge, delirious with pride, and their roar carried to the king’s ear, still ringing from all those guns.

As he braced himself in the rocking barge, he looked the part, this king, all silk and fine brocade, “tall and full of dignity,” as one observer recorded, “his countenance florid and good-natured.” At thirty-five, George had the round chin and long nose of his German forebears, with fine white teeth and blue eyes that bulged from their orbits. He had been a sickly baby, not expected to survive infancy; now he incessantly touted “air, moderate exercise, and diet,” and he could often be found on horseback in pursuit of stag or hare. Not for another fifteen years would he be stricken with the first extended symptoms—perhaps caused by porphyria, a hereditary affliction—that included abdominal pain, neuritis, incoherence, paranoia, and delirium. More attacks followed later in his life, along with the madness that wrecked his old age.

Unkind and untrue things often were said of him, such as the claim that he could not read until age eleven; in fact, at a much younger age he could read and write in both English and German. There was no denying that he was an awkwardly shy boy, “silent, modest, and easily abashed,” as a courtier observed. In 1758 a tutor described the prince at twenty, noting traits that would bear more than a passing resemblance to the adult king: “He has rather too much attention to the sins of his neighbor.… He has great command of his passions, and will seldom do wrong except when he mistakes wrong for right.” Still, in the past decade or so he had grown into an admirable man of parts—diligent, dutiful, habitually moderate, peevish but rarely bellicose. Not easily duped, he had what one duchess called “a wonderful way of knowing what is going forward.” He was frugal in an age of excess, pious at a time of impiety. His interests ranged from physics and theology to horticulture and astronomy—he had built the Royal Observatory at Richmond to view the transit of Venus in 1769—and his tastes ran from high to low: Handel, Shakespeare, silly farces that brought his hearty guffaw ringing from the royal box. His sixty-five thousand books would stock the British national library.

Even his idiosyncrasies could be endearing. Until blindness overtook him in the early 1800s, George served as his own secretary, meticulously dating his correspondence with both the day of the month and the precise time, to the very minute. He copied out his own recipes for cough syrup (rosemary, rice, vinegar, brown sugar, all “boiled in silver”) and insecticide (wormwood, vinegar, lime, swine’s fat, quicksilver). He kept critical notes on dramatic actors—“had a formal gravity in his mien, and a piercing eye” or “more manly than elegant, of the middle stature, inclining to corpulency.” He would personally decide which English worthies should get the pairs of kangaroos brought home by an expedition to Australia. Increasingly his conversational style inclined to repetitive exclamation: “What! What! What!” or “Sad accident! Sad accident!” His compulsion for detail drew him into debates on the proper placement of straps on Foot Guards uniforms.

Unlike the two German-born Georges who preceded him—the House of Hanover had been tendered the throne at Westminster in 1714, when Britain was desperate for a Protestant monarch—this George was thoroughly English. “Born and educated in this country,” he proclaimed, “I glory in the name of Britain.” The three requirements of a British king came easily to him: to shun Roman Catholicism, to obey the law, and to acknowledge Parliament, which gave him both an annual income of £800,000 and an army. Under reforms of the last century, he could not rule by edict but, rather, needed the cooperation of his ministers and both houses of Parliament. He saw himself as John Bull, the frock-coated, commonsensical embodiment of this sceptered isle, while acknowledging that “I am apt to despise what I am not accustomed to.”

There was the rub. Unkind things were sometimes said of him, and not all were untrue. George disliked disorder, and he loathed disobedience. He had an inflexible attachment to his own prejudices, with, one biographer later wrote, “the pertinacity that marks little minds of all ranks.” His “unforgiving piety,” in the phrase of a contemporary, caused him to resist political concession and to impute moral deficiencies to his opponents. He bore grudges.

He saw himself as both a moral exemplar and the guardian of British interests—a thankless task, given his belief that he lived in “the wickedest age that ever was seen.” Royal duty required that he help the nation avoid profligacy and error. He was no autocrat, but his was the last word; absent strong, countervailing voices from his ministers, his influence would be paramount, particularly with respect to, say, colonial policy.

His obstinacy derived not only from a mulish disposition but from sincere conviction: the empire, so newly congealed, must not melt away. George had long intended to rule as well as reign, and as captain general of Britain’s armed forces, he took great pride in reciting the capital ships in his navy, in scribbling endless lists of regiments and army generals, in knowing the strong points of Europe’s fortified towns and the soundings of naval ports and how many guns the Royal Artillery deployed in America. He was, after all, defender not only of the faith but of the realm. In recent sittings for portrait painters, he had begun to wear a uniform.

And if his subjects cheered him to the echo, why should they not? Theirs was the greatest, richest empire since Rome. Britain was ascendant, with mighty revolutions—agrarian and industrial—well under way. A majority of all European urban growth in the first half of the century had occurred in England; that proportion was now expanding to nearly three-quarters, with the steam engine patented in 1769 and the spinning jenny a year later. Canals were cut, roads built, highwaymen hanged, coal mined, iron forged. Sheep would double in weight during the century; calf weights tripled. England and Wales now boasted over 140,000 retail shops. A nation of shopkeepers had been born.

War had played no small role. Since the end of the last century, Britain had fought from Flanders and Germany to Iberia and south Asia. Three dynastic, coalition wars against France and her allies, beginning in 1689, ended indecisively. A fourth—the Seven Years’ War—began so badly that the sternest measures had been taken aboard the Monarch in these very waters. Here on March 14, 1757, Admiral John Byng, convicted by court-martial of “failing to do his utmost” during a French attack on Minorca, had been escorted in a howling gale to a quarterdeck sprinkled with sawdust to absorb his blood. Sailors hoisted aboard a coffin already inscribed with his name. Dressed in a light gray coat, white breeches, and a white wig, Byng knelt on a cushion and removed his hat. After a pardonable pause, he dropped a handkerchief from his right hand to signal two ranks of marines with raised muskets. They fired. Voltaire famously observed that he died “pour encourager les autres.”

The others had indeed been encouraged. The nation’s fortunes soon reversed. Triumphant Britain massed firepower in her blue-water fleet and organized enough maritime mobility to transport assault troops vast distances, capturing strongholds from Quebec and Havana to Manila in what would also be called the Great War for the Empire. British forces routed the French in the Caribbean, Africa, India, and especially North America, with help from American colonists. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” one happy Briton reported.

Spoils under the Treaty of Paris in 1763 were among the greatest ever won by force of arms. From France, Britain took Canada and half a billion fertile acres between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, plus several rich islands in the West Indies and other prizes. Spain ceded Florida and the Gulf Coast. Britain emerged with the most powerful navy in history and the world’s largest merchant fleet, some eight thousand sail. The royal dockyards, of which Portsmouth was preeminent, had become both the nation’s largest employer and its most sophisticated industrial enterprise.

“There shall be a Christian, universal, and perpetual peace,” the treaty had declared, “as well by sea as by land.” In time, none of that would hold true. Yet for now, Britain cowed her rivals and dominated Europe’s trade with Asia, Africa, and North America. “I felt a completion of happiness,” the Scottish diarist James Boswell had recently exclaimed. “I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.” This year another writer, George Macartney, would coin a more dignified phrase, a paean to “this vast empire, on which the sun never sets.”

The king had agreed to dine that June afternoon aboard the ninety-gun Barfleur, and as he clambered to the weather deck, sailors hoisted his royal standard to the main topmast head. A boatswain tweeted a silver whistle, kettledrums rumbled, the marine guard snapped to attention, and every ship in the fleet loosed another twenty-one-gun salute. George adored his navy, over three hundred warships scattered across the seven seas, and with Barfleur cleared for action, he took time to poke about.

More than two thousand mature oaks had been felled to build a ship like this, the biggest, most complex machine in the eighteenth-century world, the steam engine and spinning jenny be damned. The king admired the massive oak balks, the knees chopped from tree forks, the thick planks wider than a big man’s handspan, the gun decks painted bright red to lessen the psychological shock of blood spilled in battle. Twenty or more miles of rope had been rigged in a loom of shrouds, ratlines, stays, braces, and halyards. Masts, yards, spars, tops, and crosstrees rose overhead in geometric elegance. Even at anchor this wooden world sang, as timbers pegged and jointed, dovetailed and mortised, emitted creaks, groans, and squeals. Belowdecks, where each sailor got twenty-eight inches of sleeping width for his hammock, the powder monkeys wore felt slippers to avoid creating sparks in the magazine. The smells of tar, hemp, pine pitch, and varnish mingled with the brine of bilgewater and vinegar fumigant and the hog-lard pomade sailors used to grease their queues. All in all, it was the precise odor of empire.

Thirty dining companions joined George around a horseshoe table. The royal cook had lugged the king’s plate and silver from St. James’s Palace, along with seemingly enough linen to give Barfleur a new suit of sails. For nearly three hours they feasted on thirty-one covers, billed as “soups, removes of fish, removes of roasts, pies,” then more “roasts, pastry, aspics, blancmanges, and jellies,” followed by fruit, ices, and compotes. The libations carted to Portsmouth were no less prodigious: 5,580 bottles of wine and 1,140 bottles of rum, arrack, brandy, beer, and cider.

At six p.m., the assembled guests toasted Queen Charlotte’s health, and by custom, after the king left the table, they drank to his health, too. Again aboard his barge, he passed down the double line of ships. Each company gave three cheers and separate gun salutes. When his oarsmen pulled for Portsmouth, the dockyard cannons barked again, joined by ringing bells. Farthing candles stuck in saucers and gallipots illuminated every window in town. George would later declare that he had never had a finer day.

The king was quartered in a quiet, well-aired house within the dockyards, his bedstead, sheets, and a few sticks of furniture sent from London. That evening he was again alone with his thoughts, except for three aides in adjacent rooms, servants in the garret, and a hundred soldiers of the Foot Guards patrolling outside. An elegant model of the 104-gun Victory had been placed in the sitting room for his pleasure.

James Boswell might hug himself in happiness, but uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. George knew very well that victory in war and a decade of empire building brought complications. New territories had to be absorbed and organized, both for defense and for the profit of the mother country. Did London have the wit to manage these vast holdings, scattered across five continents? Britain now owned thirty separate colonies in the New World alone, with almost two thousand slave plantations growing sugarcane in the West Indies. Emigration from the British Isles, higher this year than ever, had become “epidemical amongst the most useful of our people,” an official warned; in just fifteen years, 3 percent of Scotland’s population and almost as many Irish had bolted for the New World in what one Scot called “America madness.” The empire was both a political construct and a business enterprise—colonies existed to enhance imperial grandeur by providing raw materials and buying British goods—so the “disease of wandering,” as Dr. Samuel Johnson dubbed this migration, was unnerving. And, of course, the Treaty of Paris had left various European powers aggrieved if not humiliated, with smoldering resentments among the Prussians, the Spanish, the Dutch, and, most of all, the French. After the treaty was signed, Britain would remain bereft of European allies for a quarter century.

Then there was debt: the Great War for the Empire had cost £100 million, much of it borrowed, and the country was still strapped for money. There had been fearful, if exaggerated, whispers of national bankruptcy. With the British debt now approaching a quarter billion pounds, interest payments devoured roughly half of the £12 million collected in yearly tax revenue. Britons were already among Europe’s most heavily taxed citizens, with ever-larger excise fees on soap, salt, candles, paper, carriages, male servants, racehorses—often 25 percent or more of an item’s value. The cost of this week’s extravaganza in Portsmouth—estimated at £22,000—would not help balance the books.

It had seemed only fair that the colonists should help shoulder the burden. A typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, compared to the average Englishman’s twenty-five shillings—a ratio of one to fifty—even as Americans benefited from eradication of the French and Spanish threats, from the protection of trade by the Royal Navy, and from British regiments keeping peace along the Indian frontier at a cost that soon exceeded £400,000 a year. Yet things had gone badly. The Stamp Act, adopted in 1765, taxed paper in the colonies, from playing cards and pamphlets to wills, newspapers, and tax receipts. Americans reacted by terrorizing British revenue officers—stamp agents in the thirteen colonies reportedly collected a total of £45, all of it in Georgia—and by boycotting imports so ferociously that some British factories closed, idling thousands. Repeal of the act in March 1766 triggered drunken revels from Boston to Savannah, with fireworks, much bad celebratory verse, and, in New York, the commissioning of a huge equestrian statue of George III, the “best of kings,” tricked up as Marcus Aurelius.

English workers in places like Sheffield and Birmingham also cheered, but the best of kings had doubts. “I am more and more grieved at the accounts in America,” he had grumbled in December 1765. “Where this spirit will end is not to be said.” Two years later, the government tried again with the Townshend Acts, named for a witty, rambunctious chancellor of the exchequer known as “Champagne Charlie.” Import duties on lead, glass, paint, and other commodities provoked another violent American reaction, with British exports to the colonies plummeting by half. To maintain order, in 1768 the government dispatched four regiments to fractious Boston; that, too, turned sour in March 1770, when skittish troops fired into a street mob, killing five. Two soldiers were convicted of manslaughter—their thumbs so branded—and the regiments discreetly decamped from town, including “the Vein Openers,” as Bostonians called the 29th Regiment troops involved in “the Massacre.” That spring, Britain repealed all Townshend duties except for the trifling tax on tea, left intact to affirm Parliament’s fiscal authority.

An edgy calm returned to the colonies, but British moral and political authority had sloughed away, bit by bit. Many Britons now viewed Americans as unruly, ungrateful children in need of caning. Many Americans nurtured an inflated sense of their economic leverage and pined for the traditional policy of “salutary neglect,” which for generations had permitted self-sufficiency and autonomy, including governance through local councils and colonial assemblies that had long controlled fiscal matters. Colonists also resented British laws that prohibited them from making hats, woolens, cloth, and other goods that might compete with manufacturers in the mother country. Almost imperceptibly, a quarrel over taxes and filial duty metastasized into a struggle over sovereignty. With no elected delegates in Parliament, the Americans had adopted a phrase heard in Ireland for decades: “no taxation without representation.”

George had never traveled beyond England, and in his long life he never would, not to Ireland, to the Continent, not even to Scotland, and certainly not to America. None of his ministers had been to the New World, either. There was much they did not know or understood imperfectly: that the American population, now 2.5 million, was more than doubling every quarter century, an explosive growth unseen in recorded European history and fourfold England’s rate; that two-thirds of white colonial men owned land, compared to one-fifth in England; that two-thirds were literate, more than in England; that in most colonies two-thirds could vote, compared to one Englishman in six; that provincial America glowed with Enlightenment aspiration, so that a city like Philadelphia now rivaled Edinburgh for medical education and boasted almost as many booksellers—seventy-seven—as England’s top ten provincial towns combined.

Also: that eradication of those French and Spanish threats had liberated Americans from the need for British muscle; that America now made almost 15 percent of the world’s crude iron, foreshadowing an industrial strength that would someday dwarf Britain’s; that, if lacking ships like Barfleur, the Americans were fearless seafarers and masters of windship construction, with an intimate knowledge of every inlet, estuary, and shoal from Nova Scotia to Barbados; that nearly a thousand American vessels traded in Britain alone.

And: that unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples, the Americans were heavily armed. Not only were they nimble with firelocks, which were as common as kettles; they also deployed in robust militias experienced in combat against Europeans, Indians, and insurrectionist slaves.

Sensing its own ignorance, the government had drafted a rudimentary questionnaire that would soon be sent to colonial governors. The twenty-two questions ranged from No. 3, “What is the size and extent of the province, the number of acres supposed to be contained therein?” and No. 4, “What rivers are there?” to No. 10, “What methods are used to prevent illegal trade, and are the same effectual?” and No. 21, “What are the ordinary & extraordinary experiences of your government?” No doubt some helpful answers would emerge.

The remainder of the king’s stay in Portsmouth flew past. George once asserted that seven hours of sleep sufficed for a man, eight for a woman, and nine for a fool. No fool, he was up early each morning to stick his nose into every corner of the dockyard, asking questions and pondering the nuances of ship ballast and the proper season for felling compass timber. As he examined the new ninety-gun Princess Royal, soon to be launched, a master shipwright bellowed for silence; thirty comrades then shouldered their adzes and sang, “Tell Rome and France and Spain, / Britannia scorns their chain, / Great George is king.” Later he watched intently as workmen caulked the Ajax, set the mainmast on Valiant, and swung the ribs into position on Lyon and Berwick. He toured the new oar maker’s shop, the hemp house, the brewery, the cooperage, sail lofts, and mast sheds. Smiths in the forge repaired a four-ton anchor under his eye, and in the ropewalk he watched as three thousand strands were woven into a single twenty-four-inch cable intended for the largest ships of the line. Each afternoon he returned to the Barfleur for dinner, trailed by the usual squadron of yachts and yawls. On Friday night, soldiers, sailors, and townsfolk lined Portsmouth’s ramparts and huzzahed themselves hoarse during a final feu de joie, with another triple discharge of cannons and muskets.

Even a landlubber king recognized that just as his empire was under stress, so too his fleet. Sea power was fragile. A half dozen obsolete ships had been broken up for scrap in the past year, and no new ones launched. The Princess Royal, headed for sea in October, had taken six years to build. Although some wooden warships gave service for decades, many lasted only eight to fifteen years, depending on the seas they plied. Each required incessant, costly repairs in jammed yards like this one. Ships built with green timber—seasoned for less than three years—sometimes had only half the life span, or even a third. The urgent naval demands of the Seven Years’ War had devoured England’s reserves of seasoned oak; many warships during and after the war were built green, which left them vulnerable to dry rot and other ills. New seasoning sheds were under construction to replenish timber supplies, but much of the British fleet was nearing the end of its life. Simply making a new eighteen-ton mainmast for a one-hundred-gun ship—a white pine stick forty yards long and forty inches in diameter—took a dozen shipwrights two months. Portsmouth and other royal yards needed more skilled shipwrights, many more. It did not help recruitment that they earned the same two shillings and one penny per day paid in 1699.

Uneasy lay the head, but at six forty-five a.m. on Saturday, June 26, after pardoning debtors in the Portsmouth jail and dispensing a few royal favors—including £250 for the local poor and £1,500 to be divided among the dockyard workforce—the king climbed into his chaise for the return to Kew. A few final gun salvos boomed, and happy subjects ran after his cavalcade as it rolled beyond Portsea Bridge. In Godalming he emerged from the cab to stand in flowers piled to his knees. A band crashed through “God Save the King,” sung with such fervor by the locals that George wept, then joined the chorus.

“The king is exceeding delighted with his reception at Portsmouth,” wrote the painter Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy of Arts. “He was convinced he was not so unpopular as the newspapers would represent him to be.” Foreign ambassadors in London who had been invited guests in Portsmouth sent reports to their capitals with admiring descriptions of Britain’s might, just as the government had intended. Particular note was taken of the courier who set out for Versailles from the French envoy’s house in Great George Street; that dispatch reportedly described the review as “most noble.”

Later in the year, the Portsmouth spectacle would be mounted as a stage production by the celebrated actor David Garrick, who hired a Parisian set designer to convert the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane into a dockyard and anchorage. Toy cannons popped, model ships sailed on billowing fabric that simulated a rolling sea, and the cast pressed toward the footlights. “Rule, Britannia!” they sang. “Britannia, rule the waves.”

Avenging the Tea

The celebratory mood soon faded: the next eighteen months proved bleak. An American woman the king would never meet, a New Jersey Presbyterian named Jemima Condict, captured the prevailing distemper in the colonies when she wrote, “We have troublesome times a-coming for there is a great disturbance abroad in the earth & they say it is tea that caused it.”

Seventeen million pounds of troublesome tea, more than England consumed in a year, had accumulated mostly in warehouses along Lime and Fenchurch Streets, a short walk from the Tower of London. The East India Company, Britain’s largest mercantile enterprise, tottered toward bankruptcy, in part because too many Britons preferred cheaper tea provided by European smugglers. Even a new East India monopoly on Indian opium, to be peddled in China, could not compensate for the firm’s mismanagement, plus a depressed international market for tea. The company’s dire financial plight jeopardized the broader British economy.

Just before the king’s excursion to Portsmouth, an ingenious, ill-advised rescue plan had passed Parliament, hardly noticed by the London press. The Tea Act restructured the East India Company and gave it a monopoly on tea sold in America. The company could appoint its own American agents, eliminating the expense of British wholesalers; the tax of three pence per pound imposed under the Townshend Acts would be retained to again affirm Parliament’s authority, but other export duties were eliminated. The price of tea in America would drop by more than a third, selling for less than the smuggled Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese tea popular in the American market. Pleased by this windfall, the East India Company prepared two thousand lead-lined tea chests for shipment to New World ports.

Too clever by half, the plan infuriated both smugglers and American merchants now superseded by favored East India agents. It implied Parliament’s authority to create monopolies for other commodities and reawakened the fraught issue of taxation without representation. The cynical manipulation of colonial markets on behalf of British mercantile interests nudged American moderates toward common cause with radicals who deplored all British meddling in American affairs. In an attempt to stigmatize the beverage, one writer asserted that tea turned those who drank it into “weak, effeminate, and creeping valetudinarians.” English tea supposedly attracted insects, aggravated smallpox, and, a Boston physician insisted, caused “spasms, vapors, hypochondrias, apoplexies of the serious kind, palsies, and dropsies.”

Others took bolder measures. On the evening of December 16, 1773, a few dozen men said to be “dressed in the Indian manner,” their faces darkened by lampblack or charcoal, descended with war whoops down Milk Street in Boston to board three merchant ships moored at Griffin’s Wharf. Prying open the hatches, they used block and tackle to hoist from the holds hundreds of heavy chests containing forty-five tons of Bohea, Congou, Singlo, Souchong, and Hyson tea. For three hours they methodically smashed the lids and scooped the leaves into the harbor. Confederates in small boats used rakes and oars to scatter the floating piles, and by morning almost £10,000 worth of soggy brown flakes drifted in windrows from the wharf to Castle Island and the Dorchester shore. “The devil is in these people,” a British naval officer wrote after surveying the damage. But a local lawyer exulted. “This destruction of the tea,” John Adams declared, “is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid, & inflexible.” An equestrian silversmith named Paul Revere carried a detailed account of the event to New York and Philadelphia in the first of his famous gallops. The tea party, as this episode later was called, inspired the kind of doggerel that always annoyed the British: “Rally, Mohawks, bring out your axes, / And tell King George we’ll pay no taxes / On his foreign tea.”

“I am much hurt,” King George confessed when news of this outrage reached him in mid-January 1774. Sorrow soon yielded to anger. An American in London described “a great wrath” sweeping Britain, not least because although thousands had watched or participated at Griffin’s Wharf on the night of December 16, only one witness agreed to testify in court, and then only if the trial convened in London. Demands mounted for vengeance against Boston, “the metropolis of sedition,” including proposals that the town be reduced to salted ruins, like Carthage. The essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, known without affection as Dictionary Johnson, had already denounced the Americans as “a race of convicts, [who] ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” Now Dr. Johnson “breathed out threatenings and slaughter, calling them rascals, robbers, pirates, and exclaiming that he’d burn and destroy them,” his companion James Boswell recorded.

What should be done? Some merchants—potters and shoemakers in Staffordshire, the makers of fishing nets and lines in Bridport—signed petitions urging caution, for fear that the loss of American markets would cripple their businesses. The colonists bought up to 20 percent of British manufactured goods, but the market for certain commodities was much bigger—a quarter of British white salt and wrought brass, a third of refined sugar, tin, and worsted socks, half of wrought copper, glassware, and silk goods, and two-thirds to three-quarters of iron nails, English cordage, and beaver hats. The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, at work on a sweeping study of political economy titled The Wealth of Nations, to be published in 1776, argued that Britain would be better off jettisoning her colonies. The New World was “not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine … mere loss instead of profit.” Confusion and uncertainty plagued the government, beset with conflicting reports and opinions. Was this challenge to British authority widespread or limited to a few scoundrels in New England? Was conciliation possible? Appeasement had failed after the Stamp and Townshend Acts—would violence now be necessary?

The king’s heart hardened. Spurning petitions and appeals from those pleading for moderation, he vowed in March 1774 to “stop the present disorders.” To Parliament he denounced “a dangerous spirit of resistance” in America among “my deluded subjects,” who, according to a new legal opinion by the British attorney general, were committing “the crime of high treason.” The troubles in Boston threatened “anarchy, the most terrible of all evils.”

George’s resolve helped his ministers rally around three critical assumptions, each of which proved false: that most colonists remained loyal to the Crown, notwithstanding troublemakers in Massachusetts capable of inciting a rabble; that firmness, including military firepower if necessary, would intimidate the obstreperous and restore harmony; and that failure to reassert London’s authority would eventually unstitch the empire, causing Britain to “revert to her primitive insignificancy in the map of the world,” as a member of the House of Commons warned.

Here, then, was the crux. The king and his men believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies. The erosion of authority in America, followed by a loss of sovereignty, would encourage rebellions in Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, India. Dominoes would topple. “Destruction must follow disunion,” the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, warned. With the empire dismembered, an impoverished Great Britain, no longer great, would invite “the scorn of Europe” and exploitation by enemies in France, Spain, and elsewhere. Those windrows of wet tea leaves foretold political and economic ruin.

From late March through June 1774, Parliament adopted four laws known collectively in Britain as the Coercive Acts (and later in America as the Intolerable Acts). The first was punitive: Boston’s port must close until the cost of the ruined tea was paid to the East India Company. The other laws tightened British control over Massachusetts by converting an elected council into one appointed by the governor, by restricting town meetings and jury selection, and by permitting royal officials accused of serious crimes to be tried in England or another colony. British troops would return to Boston under a commander in chief who would also serve as the royal governor.

With exquisitely bad timing, in June Parliament passed another sweeping law, one that colonists assumed was part of the tea party retaliation but that in fact had taken years to craft. The Quebec Act replaced military rule in newly acquired Canada with an autocratic civilian government, while legitimizing the Catholic Church’s authority and vastly extending the provincial boundaries west and south, to the rich territory between the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. The empowerment of popery enraged Protestant New Englanders, who for more than a century had battled French Catholics and their Indian allies; colonists from New York through the Carolinas, keen to expand west of the Appalachians, were likewise infuriated at being confined to the Atlantic seaboard.

“The die is now cast,” George wrote. “The colonies must either submit or triumph. We must not retreat.”

The die was indeed cast. Despite London’s hope of isolating Boston as a pariah, indignation and resentment swept the colonies. The Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act galvanized American resistance, empowering the radicals and further converting neutrals and moderates to a cause now touched with fire. Rather than shun those who staged the tea party, towns in New England and as far south as Charleston sent food, firewood, and money to sustain Boston when the port closed in June.

In September, fifty-five delegates from a dozen colonies—Georgia remained ambivalent—gathered in Philadelphia, emboldened enough to call themselves the Continental Congress. Not only did they endorse resistance to the Coercive Acts, the delegates also agreed to halt trade with the British Empire over the coming months. Imports and exports would be forbidden in an escalating economic campaign intended to pressure London by hurting British merchants, manufacturers, and consumers. Elected committees of safety and inspection “in every county, city, and town” were to enforce this agreement on retaliatory trade restrictions, known as the Association. Civic virtue would be measured by a colonist’s refusal to consume British goods or trade with the mother country; transgressors were to be publicly shamed, or worse. The Association committees—revolutionary and robust—drew an estimated seven thousand Americans into political office for the first time. At the same time, American militia leaders had begun stockpiling gunpowder and other munitions.

“A most daring spirit of resistance and disobedience” had infected the colonies, George told Parliament that November, with “fresh violences of a very criminal nature.” As captain general and first soldier of the empire, the king would do what was necessary to compel obedience from over two million recalcitrant subjects, even if they lived three thousand miles away in a country six times larger than England. What he would call his “great lenity” toward the Americans had been a mistake; he would not make it again. “I am not sorry that the line of conduct seems now chalked out,” he wrote his chief minister, Lord North, in a note dated “48 minutes past midnight” on November 18. “Blows must decide.”

London on the march toward war was much like London at peace—aggressive, vivid, and alive with animal spirits. Cockfights and bearbaiting remained popular, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays. Raucous crowds assembled on January 10, 1775, to see six criminals—four burglars and two thieves—trundled in carts down Oxford Street to the Tyburn gallows. Another eight were condemned to death that week in an Old Bailey courtroom, among them a defendant who stole sixpence from a farm boy. The British penal code listed nearly two hundred capital crimes, including such heinous offenses as demolishing fishponds and wandering at night with one’s face blackened, not unlike the tea party hooligans in Boston. Tyburn’s hangman would rarely be idle.

The largest city in the Western world now held three-quarters of a million souls, and what a din they made: the bawl of balladmongers, knife grinders, itinerant musicians, and pleading beggars, some with rented babies on their hips; the clop and clatter of hooves and iron-wheeled carts on paving stones; the tinkling bells of scavenger drays; the cries of Thames ferrymen and higglers selling flowers, or apples, or jellied eels, or quack potions. Watchmen known as Charlies—the office dated to Charles II’s reign—called out the hour when clocks struck, proclaiming good weather or bad. With noise came the stink of sea coal and wood smoke and thick effusions from smithies, dyers’ yards, and earthenware kilns. Pigs, chickens, and cows lived in cellars with their owners, and streets served as open sewers for tripe dressers, sausage makers, and the offal of catgut spinners.

The city had 42 markets and countless public houses, including, by one later tally, 55 Swans, 90 King’s Heads, 120 Lions, but only 1 Good Man; the author Tobias Smollett claimed a man could get drunk for a penny and dead drunk for tuppence. Among the estimated ten thousand prostitutes, streetwalkers worked the Strand or the alleys near Covent Garden, where higher-priced courtesans preened in bay windows on the piazza and men paid to be flogged by women known as “posture molls.” Freaks and frauds peopled the metropolis: a certain Mary Tofts who supposedly gave birth to rabbits, an armless man who shaved with his foot, a Scot who broke glasses with a mighty shout, and shopkeepers who sold donkey as mutton and white bread kneaded with chalk or bone ash. But mostly it was a city that toiled hard: clerks and barbers, merchants and printers, coal heavers and coppersmiths with their beards stained green. If not already the world’s greatest metropolis, London was working to earn that laurel.

For those whose carriages and sedan chairs kept them above such hurly-burly, the queen’s birthday, on January 18, marked the traditional opening of London’s social season, with Parliament scheduled to convene the following day. Charlotte had been an obscure, drab German princess in 1761 when George chose her sight unseen to be his queen. During the voyage across the North Sea to Britain she took English lessons and learned to play “God Save the King” on the harpsichord; they were wed in St. James’s Palace six hours after her arrival. At his instruction, the marriage bedroom decor included seven hundred yards of blue damask, a mahogany four-poster with five mattresses, and large glass basins of goldfish. The happy union proved fecund—she produced children with lunar regularity, eventually to number fifteen—and her birthday was always cause for carefully orchestrated jubilation at St. James’s.

A peal of bells marked the day, with an oration by the archbishop of Canterbury and an ode by a royal chorus. The poet laureate scribbled verse to fill up strophes, antistrophes, and various declamations on Charlotte’s virtues. The Tower guns fired at one p.m., and illuminations brightened Westminster; those at the French ambassador’s house were exceptionally radiant, a tribute, it was said, from Queen Marie Antoinette as a gesture of royal sisterhood. But it was the birthday ball that had kept West End milliners, mantua makers, and bespoke shoe cobblers in a stitching frenzy for weeks.

The evening began badly. A fine day turned wet, and churning fog limited the visibility around St. James’s to five yards. Even footmen wielding white wands could not prevent the collision of several coaches, with bones broken and horses entangled. Constables spotted seven suspected pickpockets sidling through the pandemonium, and marched them off to Bridewell Prison. The guests soldiered on, rescuing the night through determined elegance. Pigmented ceruse rouged the cheeks, and wigs were powdered to make the eyes appear brighter, an effect enhanced by false eyebrows made from mouse skins, which were applied with gum. “The dresses were splendid and magnificent, much beyond anything I had ever before seen,” one foreign visitor wrote. “The queen appears amiable.” Of 177 peers of the realm, including 23 dukes and 77 earls, a gratifying number strode through the fog to attend their amiable queen, who wore a new diamond stomacher over her brocaded gown, with matching necklace and earrings. The minuets began at nine p.m. and continued for two hours, followed by country dances. The Morning Chronicle would assure its readers that “more brilliants were never there at one time than was seen last night.”

The king, regal in a suit of blue velvet trimmed in silver, appeared to be a happy man. Few knew that George’s good spirits derived not only from a successful fête for his queen, but from hopes that a decisive strategy had emerged to crush the American insurgency once and for all. During secret meetings this week at offices in Cleveland Row, a narrow street behind St. James’s, cabinet ministers—heeding their monarch’s sensible request for “a general plan”—drafted a scheme to send more regiments, warships, cash, and marines to Boston, along with instructions for hunting down insurgent leaders. But first, Parliament would have to agree.

For more than two hundred years, the House of Commons had met in St. Stephen’s Chapel, built within the palace of Westminster in the twelfth century for the monarch’s private worship. Window glass depicted biblical stories. Peacock feathers and squirrels’ tails had been used to paint angels on the walls and saints around the altar; white down plucked from the breasts of royal swans was daubed in paint to inflect the high blue ceiling with thousands of gold stars. When Henry VIII shifted to a new palace at Whitehall, old choir stalls became members’ benches, a Speaker’s chair replaced the altar, whitewash covered the wall paintings, and the spangled ceiling was lowered to improve the acoustics. Architect Christopher Wren added galleries above the debating chamber, which was smaller than a tennis court. The hall retained an ecclesiastical air, even as parliamentarians cracked nuts, peeled oranges, or wandered out through the lobby for a game of whist and a glass of Madeira.

On January 19, when the Commons reconvened after the Christmas holiday, members as usual were packed like sprats in a tin. With a thud, a clerk dropped 149 documents on a central table, announced that they were “papers relating to the disturbances in North America,” and in a somber tone began to read the titles of each: Royal Navy dispatches from American waters; seditious extracts from the Continental Congress; reports written by royal officials from New Hampshire to Georgia; official correspondence from London to colonial governors.

Slouched on the Treasury bench to the right of the Speaker’s chair, a corpulent, round-shouldered figure listened as the recitation droned on, his eyelids so heavy that he appeared to be dozing. Thick-lipped, with both brow and chin receding, he was said to have a tongue “too large for his mouth” and “prominent eyes that rolled about to no purpose.” No matter: Lord Frederick North, a man without vanity who referred to himself as “an old hulk,” was always pleased to be underestimated.

In the first decade of George III’s reign, six men held the office of prime minister, better known at the time as chief or first minister. They had little in common other than slender competency and an unsteady handling of Parliament. In 1770 the king turned to a childhood playmate—he and North had acted together in a schoolboy production of Joseph Addison’s Cato—and a political partnership began that would endure through a dozen difficult years. George knew he had his man when he wrote North just a few months into his new chief minister’s tenure, pleading for £13,000 in cash by day’s end because of “a most private and delicate” need—the Duke of Cumberland had successfully sued the king’s younger brother after catching him in flagrante delicto with his wife. North replied within hours that he had “no doubt of being able to procure the sum desired … in such a manner to keep it as much out of sight as possible.” George answered, “This takes a heavy load off of me.”

Even his adversaries adored North, a man “of infinite wit and pleasantry,” as one admitted. A diplomat added, “It was impossible to experience dullness in his society.” Now forty-two, the son of an earl, he was a gifted Greek and Latin scholar, adept in French, German, and Italian, with an adhesive memory, a youthful delight in the absurd, and “a temperament completely free from irascibility,” as one admirer observed. A happy husband and a doting father to six children, he was generous, companionable, and honest. “He kept his hands clean and empty,” a colleague wrote, while another noted, “What he did, he did without a mask.” North held a constituency in Banbury with fewer than two dozen eligible voters, who routinely reelected him after being plied with punch and cheese, and who were then rewarded with a haunch of venison.

Capable of reciting budget statistics for hours without consulting a note, he supervised national finance as head of the Treasury Board. Deft in debate, North was the principal defender of government policy in the Commons. In the past year he had delivered more than a hundred speeches on various measures, most of them harsh, relating to America. Many more such speeches lay ahead.

Ahead, too, lay calamity. By his own recent acknowledgment, North was “fond of indolence and a retired life.” Averse to confrontation and an instinctive conciliator, he was given to melancholy and indecision. Now he was fated to be a war minister, with his king’s empire in the balance. He could talk tough, as in his claim that “America must fear you before they will love you” or his assurance to the Commons that “four or five frigates” could close Boston Harbor because “the militia of Boston were no match for the force of this country.” Yet colleagues sensed that his heart was not in it; he lacked, one said, the requisite “despotism and violence of temper.” His confession that “upon military matters I speak ignorantly, and therefore without effect” revealed his ambivalence.

Devoted to George, he would stay the course set by his monarch, a vessel for the king’s obstinacy. A loyal friend though perhaps not a good one, he reinforced His Majesty’s narrow attitudes rather than gently widening his vision. It was North, after all, who in 1770 had said, “I can never acquiesce in the absurd notion that all men are equal.” Now, with his stack of 149 documents as proof of American perfidy, he would seek Parliament’s agreement to force submission.

The first obstacle arose in the other chamber, the House of Lords, which met nearby in a medieval hall at the south end of the Westminster warren. On January 20, William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, the venerable statesman and strategist who had engineered Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War, rose to his feet to denounce the government’s folly and to demand withdrawal of British troops from Boston. “He seemed like an old Roman senator,” a witness in the gallery reported, “rising with the dignity of age, yet speaking with the fire of youth.” Chatham’s long decline, physical and mental, was well advanced—he called himself “the scarecrow of violence”—but he knew his mind in urging reconciliation with the Americans. “All attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation must be in vain,” he warned. “We shall be forced, ultimately, to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.” France and Spain, he told the peers, “are watching your conduct, and waiting for the maturity of your errors.” He continued:

My lords, there is no time to be lost. Every moment is big with dangers.… The very first drop of blood will make a wound that will not easily be skinned over.

The old lion’s eloquence changed few minds; his motion lost 68 to 18. Ten days later, Chatham would try again with a proposal to designate Congress as a lawful entity and to suspend the Coercive Acts, with complete repeal to follow upon American acknowledgment of Parliament’s authority. Once again a heavy majority defeated the bill. Chatham wrote his wife that the government seemed “violent beyond expectation, almost to madness.”

To Lord North’s satisfaction, the House of Commons proved no less bellicose. American insurgents were “an enemy in the bowels of the kingdom,” one member insisted. Another who had seen military service in America during the last war assured his colleagues that five thousand British regulars could march through the colonies unhindered; Americans, “of a pusillanimous disposition, and utterly incapable of any sort of order or discipline,” would “never dare to face an English army.” It helped the government’s cause that roughly a hundred members of the Commons were past or current military officers, reliably loyal. It also helped that North had spent £50,000 from a Treasury slush fund in the 1774 election to buy a couple dozen seats for other pliant candidates. Further, the king had purchased additional loyalty by sprinkling lucrative sinecures and patronage appointments among members of both houses, including eleven grooms of the bedchamber, a master of the jewel office, a master falconer, an usher of the exchequer, rangers of the royal forests, seven equerries, and various masters of the harriers, buckhounds, and staghounds. “This Parliament,” observed the writer Horace Walpole, the son of a former prime minister, “appeared to be even more corrupt and servile than the two last.”

At two-thirty a.m. on February 7, the Commons by a vote of 288 to 105 supported North’s proposal to ask the king to declare Massachusetts in rebellion, and to take all measures needed to bring American insurgents to heel. “If they would submit and leave us the constitutional right of supremacy,” North said, “the quarrel would be at an end.” The Lords followed suit, 104 to 29, at one-forty a.m. the following morning. Among new members voting with the Commons majority was an elfin man with a double chin and a squat nose who in his study on Bentinck Street was writing a great saga, the first volume of which would soon be published as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Few parliamentarians would be as steadfast for the Crown as Edward Gibbon. “We have both the right and the power on our side,” he had told a friend a week earlier. “We are now arrived at the decisive moment of preserving, or of losing forever, both our trade and empire.” Yet few would be as reflective, as when he later conceded, “I took my seat at the beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America, and supported with many a sincere and silent vote, the rights, though not perhaps the interest, of the mother country.” For now, a few hours after casting his vote, Gibbon wrote, “With firmness, all may go well. Yet I sometimes doubt.”

The king had no doubts. Parliament’s resolve “ought to open the eyes of the deluded Americans,” he wrote North on the morning of Wednesday, February 8. “But if it does not, it must set every delicate man at liberty to avow the propriety of the most coercive measures.” Beyond majority votes in both houses, George wanted a theatrical, public display of support. A few hours later, he again wrote North to propose “a large attendance” at St. James’s the next day. Hundreds from the Commons and the Lords were to make the short journey to the palace, as a group, to demonstrate unity. “I therefore hope,” he added, “you will insinuate the propriety of this.”

Shortly before three p.m. on Thursday, braving a blustery wind from the southwest, Parliament picked a path through the willows and poplars of St. James’s Park to the red brick octagonal towers of that “irregular pile,” as one critic described the palace. The London Gazette would report that “there never was known so many of the bishops and peers to attend an address to His Majesty.… There was also the greatest number of commoners ever known on a like occasion.” Not far from the hearth inscribed with the initials of Henry VIII and his doomed queen Anne Boleyn, the king listened as Parliament’s petition was read aloud:

We find that a part of your Majesty’s subjects in the province of the Massachusetts Bay have proceeded so far to resist the authority of the supreme legislature, that a rebellion at this time actually exists.… We consider it as our indispensable duty, humbly to beseech your Majesty that you will take the most effectual measures to enforce due obedience to the laws and authority of the supreme legislature.

George was nearsighted, and some faces around the room were blurry as he read his brief reply, composed with North’s help:

You may depend on my taking the most speedy and effectual measures for enforcing due obedience to the laws.… It is my ardent wish that this disposition may have a happy effect on the temper and conduct of my subjects in America.

Events now moved swiftly. That very day the king ordered several regiments in Ireland to prepare for “foreign service.” On Friday, North introduced another bill, this one to prevent all New England colonies from trading with any foreign nations and to exclude them from the world’s richest fishing grounds, in the North Atlantic. That measure would again muster large majorities. A few days later, Parliament approved hiring another two thousand sailors for the navy; the government also requested money for an extra 4,400 soldiers, with the intention of expanding the army in America to almost 11,000. In recent weeks, the king had considered ousting the military commander there, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, on suspicion of insufficient grit; instead he chose to send three young major generals to stiffen Gage’s spine. He told North to give each an extra £500 before they sailed—“they have behaved so very properly and are so poor.” Whatever Gage’s shortcomings, North knew that nearly all of the forty-five generals senior to him, some in their eighties, lacked the vigor, the experience, or the bloody-mindedness to take command in Boston. “I do not know whether our generals will frighten the enemy,” he supposedly quipped, “but I know that they frighten me.”

Still, the king felt sure of his course. To North he wrote on February 15, at precisely 10:06 a.m.: “I entirely place my security in the protection of the Divine Disposer of All Things, and shall never look to the right or left but steadily pursue the track which my conscience dictates to be the right one.”

Preparing for War

For more than three centuries, the Tower of London had issued departing armies the ordnance needed to fight Britain’s expeditionary battles, from field guns and shoulder arms to bullet molds, powder flasks, and musket flints. In the early spring of 1775, the place grew busy again. “Many thousand firearms sent out of the Tower and shipped on board the transports,” a visiting American artist wrote. “Kegs of flints marked ‘Boston’ on each keg, with all the implements of war.” A Tower armory reportedly held eighty thousand stand of arms, “bright and shining.” Visitors could pay four pence to view the “Royal Train of Artillery,” from 6-pounders to 24-pounders, some with new leveling screws for quicker aim and greater accuracy. The train also included 13-inch mortars and “carcass” shells packed with combustibles designed to incinerate enemy towns. New brass cannons filled an adjacent storehouse more than a hundred yards long, with sponges, rammers, handspikes, drag ropes, and other gunnery tools, plus four thousand harnesses for pull teams. Obsolete weapons decorated Tower walls in fantastic sculptures, like the seven-headed hydra constructed from old pistols. Stacked bayonets and ancient firelocks formed a corkscrew pillar twenty-two feet high. The place was a tabernacle of firepower.

Gun shops clustered along the Thames below the Tower walls assembled the flintlock musket known as the Brown Bess. Smiths fitted the barrels and locks, mostly forged in the Midlands from imported Swedish iron, to walnut stocks; they then attached the “furniture”—brass and iron mounts, including triggers and butt plates. Each musket cost one pound, thirteen shillings, plus four pence to prove the barrel and fit a bayonet. Tower officials also tested the potency of gunpowder made in government and private mills. The British appetite for powder was voracious: each foot regiment typically received 42,000 powder charges a year, enough for every soldier to fire 60 to 120 lead balls. That allotment would increase in heavy combat. A single warship of 100 guns might carry 535 barrels, nearly 27 tons; even a small naval sloop could carry 6 tons, more powder than would be found in all the rebel magazines around Boston a few months hence. “Incredible quantities of ammunition and stores shipped and shipping from Tower Wharf for America,” another correspondent reported.

Precisely how this formidable strength should be wielded against America remained in dispute among the king’s men. “A conquest by land is unnecessary,” the secretary at war, Lord William Barrington, had advised in December, “when the country can be reduced first to distress, and then to obedience, by our marine.” That marine—the Royal Navy—might have its own woes, but General Edward Harvey, the adjutant general and the highest army official in Britain, agreed that “attempting to conquer America internally with our land force is as evil an idea as ever controverted common sense.” He added bluntly: “It is impossible.”

The army’s small size fueled this consternation. In 1760, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, Britain had mustered more than 200,000 men, including mercenaries. Now the army’s paper strength had dipped below 50,000—less than a third the size of France’s army—and no more than 36,000 soldiers actually filled the ranks, of whom thousands kept the restive Irish in check. Recruiting was difficult, and although many of the army’s 3,500 officers had combat experience, the force had fought few major battles since Quebec and Minden, sixteen years earlier. A few prominent commanders refused to fight the Americans, among them Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who had led North American forces against the French from 1758 to 1763. While some junior officers were keen to earn their spurs in New England, enough were leaving the service that in February the king declared he would “not listen to any further requests” from those hoping to sell their commissions rather than embark for America; he deemed such behavior a “great impropriety.” Lord North, as early as September 1774, had suggested that “Hessians and Hanoverians could be employed if necessary.” During the winter, secret negotiations had begun in Kassel to retain German hirelings, should war erupt in America.

A fateful momentum swept the government along. Something must be done; even those wary of war agreed that American rebellion could not be condoned. Much of the particular planning fell to slender, rigorous William Legge, the Earl of Dartmouth and the colonial secretary, who was so pious a Christian that he was known as the “Psalm Singer”; his country home near Birmingham had provided a refuge for evangelical preachers and for revival meetings of sobbing, hysterical worshippers. Raised in the same household as North, his stepbrother, Lord Dartmouth was hardly a warmonger. But he believed that prideful rebels disobeyed both their British masters and their God. Obedience and Christ’s redemption were needed to set things right, along with a few regiments. After a decade of fitful, indecisive political skirmishing, a short, sharp contest of arms offered an appealing clarity.

And so war stuffs spilled from the Tower and other depots to be loaded onto westbound ships: canteens, leather cartridge boxes, watch coats, tents, five-ton wagons by the dozen, muskets by the hundreds, powder by the ton. There was a run on New World maps, although one London skeptic later wrote, “The small scale of our maps deceived us, and as the word ‘America’ takes up no more room than the word ‘Yorkshire,’ we seemed to think the territories they represent are much the same bigness, though Charleston is as far from Boston as London from Venice.”

Troops tramped toward the ports. A London newspaper reported that a light cavalry regiment preparing to deploy had inscribed “DEATH OR GLORY” on its caps, with an embroidered skull. Seven regiments of foot bound for America were brought to strength by drafting soldiers from units left behind. Each regiment was also permitted to take sixty women, twelve servants, and eighty-six tons of baggage. On the southern coast of Ireland, Cork grew so crowded that officers waiting to embark on transport ships complained of difficulty in finding lodging. Soldiers living in hovels on Blarney Lane or Brogue Market Street practiced the manual of arms, though some lacked muskets. Each would be issued a bunk, a bolster, a blanket, and a spoon for the voyage. The usual drunken sprees and fistfights between soldiers and sailors kept officers alert; dragoons preparing to sail from Cork found the ships’ holds stacked with so many casks of porter being smuggled for sale in Boston that they could not reach the stalls to feed their horses.

As the squadrons awaited a fair wind, a vague unease drifted through the kingdom. “Our stake is deep,” wrote Horace Walpole. “It is that kind of war in which even victory may ruin us.” But the man who reigned over that kingdom remained constant, as ever. “When once these rebels have felt a smart blow,” George told his Admiralty, “they will submit.”

Blows would decide, as the king had predicted. Yet no one could foresee that the American War of Independence would last 3,059 days. Or that the struggle would be marked by more than 1,300 actions, mostly small and bloody, with a few large and bloody, plus 241 naval engagements in a theater initially bounded by the Atlantic seaboard, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico, before expanding to other lands and other waters.

Roughly a quarter million Americans would serve the cause in some military capacity. At least one in ten of them would die for that cause—25,674 deaths by one tally, as many as 35,800 by another. Those deaths were divided with rough parity among battle, disease, and British prisons, a larger proportion of the American population to perish in any conflict other than the Civil War. If many considered the war providential—ordained by God’s will and shaped by divine grace—certainly the outcome would also be determined by gutful soldiering, endurance, hard decisions (good and bad), and luck (good and bad). The odds were heavily stacked against the Americans: no colonial rebellion had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. But, as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought for territory or the usual commercial advantages. Instead, what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come. Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.

Those 3,059 hard days would yield two tectonic results. The first was in the United Kingdom, where the reduction of the empire by about one-third, including the demolition of the new dominions in North America, proved to be as divisive as any misfortune to befall the nation in the eighteenth century, at a cost of £128 million and thousands of British lives. The broader conflict that began in 1778, with the intervention of European powers on America’s behalf, led to the only British defeat in the seven Anglo-French wars fought between 1689 and 1815. Of course, what was lost by force of arms could be regained, and a second British Empire, in different garb, would flourish in the next century.

The second consequence was epochal and enduring: the creation of the American republic. Surely among mankind’s most remarkable achievements, this majestic construct also inspired a creation myth that sometimes resembled a garish cartoon, a melodramatic tale of doughty yeomen resisting moronic, brutal lobsterbacks. The civil war that unspooled over those eight years would be both grander and more nuanced, a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Beyond the battlefield, then and forever, stood a shining city on a hill.

An unusual bustle disturbed placid Craven Street on Monday morning, March 20, 1775. At No. 27, a looming town house with fourteen fireplaces, crates and trunks had been packed and prepared for shipment. Visitors in fine carriages had recently been seen wheeling up and wheeling off, bidding good-bye, adieu, bon voyage. Among the neighbors it was rumored that after almost two decades in London, Dr. Franklin was going home.

He was famous in Craven Street, as he was famous everywhere, though he still referred to himself as “B. Franklin, printer.” Except for a brief return visit to Philadelphia in 1763–64, and a temporary move a few years later to a different house on the street, he had lived at No. 27 since arriving in England as a colonial agent in 1757. Because he was widely deemed a “universal genius”—the accolade did not displease him—his eccentricities were forgiven: chuffing up and down the nineteen oak stairs, dumbbells in hand, for exercise; sitting nude in the open window above the street, regardless of the season, for his morning “air bath”; playing his “harmonica,” an improbable contraption constructed of thirty-seven glass hemispheres mounted on an iron spindle and rotated with a foot treadle so that he could elicit three ghostly octaves by touching the moving edges with his moistened fingers. (Mozart and Beethoven, among others, would compose for the instrument.) And Craven Street had also been his laboratory, the site where he had launched inquiries into sunspots, magnetism, lead poisoning, the organic origins of coal, carriage wheel construction, and ocean salinity. At the foot of the street, on the Thames, he had repeated his celebrated kite-and-key demonstration; St. Paul’s Cathedral, nearby, was Britain’s first structure to install his lightning rod.

The tall man who emerged onto the front stoop that morning was now sixty-nine, with thin, graying hair and sensual lips that made him look younger. He retained the broad shoulders of the leather-apron tradesman who’d once carried lead type for a living, though he had grown plump enough to call himself “a fat old fellow.” Furrows creased the prominent dome of his forehead, and the hooded blue eyes sagged. “Anxiety begins to disturb my rest,” he had written a friend in America a few weeks earlier, “and whatever robs an old man of his sleep soon demolishes him.”

He had chosen to spend this final day in London in semi-seclusion with Joseph Priestley, a fellow natural philosopher who lived a mile distant. As Franklin made his way across the city he had once loved, those anxieties weighed on him. How far he had traveled, this fifteenth child of an impoverished Boston candlemaker! With only two years of formal schooling, he had become not only a prosperous printer but the largest bookseller in Philadelphia and the most prominent paper merchant in America. At forty-two, self-made, he retired from the trades to devote himself to good causes—smallpox inoculations, paper money, and streets made safer by night watchmen paid through public taxes. He also threw himself into practical science, with inventions ranging from bifocals to efficient stoves. He had once told his mother that for his epitaph, “I would rather have it said, ‘He died usefully,’ than, ‘He died rich.’” His 1751 treatise Experiments and Observations on Electricity brought international fame for discoveries lauded by a contemporary as “the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton.” He not only invented the first device for storing electrical charges, he also named it—the battery—as he named other things in this new field: conductor, charge, discharge, armature. Electrical experimenters in France were known as franklinistes. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him “the new Prometheus,” a man who had captured heaven’s fire.

He was proud, perhaps prideful. The ink-stained printer became Dr. Franklin, thanks to the honorary degrees from Oxford and St. Andrews, and he was not above snickering at American provincialism. “Learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England almost all make a point of visiting me,” he had written in 1772 to his son William, who, thanks to Franklin’s influence, was the royal governor of New Jersey. “The K[ing] too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.” If esteemed and clubbable, he still at times seemed opaque. A man of masks and personas, he was Poor Richard, after the pseudonym adopted for the almanac he’d first published in 1732; he was also, thanks to his many whimsical pen names, Silence Dogood, Cecilia Shortface, and Obadiah Plainman. Since moving to London at age fifty-one to represent Pennsylvania, and then other colonies, he had used forty-two different signatures on his published articles.

So, too, was he a creature of contradiction. An advocate for the rights of man, he had owned slaves for thirty years, complaining that most of them were thieves. A man of temperance and discretion, he enjoyed “intrigues with low women that fell in my way” and took a common-law wife in 1730. Perhaps most confounding, he had been a zealous citizen of the empire, so exuberant in his Anglophilia that in September 1761 he curtailed a trip to the Continent to attend George III’s coronation. He had long favored excluding Germans and other non-English émigrés from the colonies. Americans “love and honor the name of Englishman,” Franklin had written in the London Chronicle in 1770; aping “English manners, fashions, and manufacturers, they have no desire of breaking the connections between the two countries.” Yet in the past year he had become so hostile to Britain that now he could fulminate like a Boston radical, his face white with rage. Franklin, these days, was a few steps ahead of an arrest warrant.

His good friend Priestley, beak-nosed and thin-lipped, offered a sympathetic ear. As librarian and companion to the Earl of Shelburne, Priestley lived in the earl’s sprawling mansion just off Berkeley Square. The son of a Calvinist cloth dresser, he, too, was a universal genius, one who, it was said, wrote books faster than people could read them. The previous August he had discovered the gas called oxygen, and he would be credited with identifying nitrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other gases, as well as photosynthesis, the principles of combustion, and the recipe for soda water. On this Monday he and Franklin pondered electricity and sundry scientific mysteries, as they had for years. Then the conversation turned to politics and what Franklin called “the impending calamities.” “Much of the time was employed in reading American newspapers,” Priestley later wrote of that day with Franklin, “especially accounts of the reception which the Boston Port Bill met with in America. And as he read … the tears trickled down his cheeks.” The coming war would likely last ten years, Franklin predicted, and he would “not live to see the end of it.”

He wept, not least, for his own shortcomings. For decades he had championed a greater Great Britain, an Anglo-American union of “mutual strength and mutual advantage.” As political upheaval strained those blood ties, he sought “to palliate matters” with various compromises, including an offer to pay for Boston’s drowned tea from his own pocket. Even now he considered the schism to be “a matter of punctilio, which two or three reasonable people might settle in half an hour.” But by degree he had grown vexed, then angry at what he called the “insolence, contempt, and abuse” of arrogant British officials toward his countrymen; the condescending reference to Americans as “foreigners” infuriated him. His writings turned acerbic: he proposed to answer the British practice of shipping convicts to America by exporting rattlesnakes to England, and his Swiftian essay, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” postulated that “a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edge.”

Then, two years ago, disaster had struck when a wise man did a foolish thing. Someone whose identity remained obscure gave Franklin a sheaf of private letters written by a Crown official in Massachusetts to a British undersecretary, urging stern measures by the government against New England troublemakers. One passage even advocated “an abridgement of what are called English liberties.” In December 1772, Franklin sent the letters to Boston as confidential intelligence for patriot leaders, but six months later they were published, causing an uproar in New England, and then in Britain. Franklin eventually placed a notice in the London Chronicle, disclosing his responsibility. British newspapers vilified him as “this old snake,” “old Doubleface,” and a “base, ungrateful, cunning, upstart thing.”

On January 29, 1774, he appeared before the king’s council in the Cockpit, a Whitehall amphitheater once used for cockfights. For more than an hour, Franklin was pelted with invective, denounced as a “man without honor” and a “hoary-headed traitor” who had “forfeited all the respect of societies and men.” The packed gallery jeered while he stood as still as statuary, wearing a fine blue suit of spotted Manchester velvet. It was the greatest humiliation of his life, and a day later he was sacked as deputy postmaster general for North America. He had made a serious error of judgment, but so had Britain, by demeaning the Crown’s best American ally in promoting imperial harmony.

In the months since that wretched day, he had shrugged off the ordeal to continue mediating between Crown and colonies. He took meetings, public and private, enduring endless palaver with men of influence and no influence, men of goodwill and ill will, men with potential remedies and men spouting nonsense. Franklin admitted to growing “irritated and heated”; he insisted on repealing the Coercive Acts, withdrawing the fleet from Boston, and removing British soldiers to Quebec or Florida. “The true art of governing the colonies,” he believed, “lies in … only letting them alone.” The government secretly intercepted and read his mail, carefully repairing the seals and making copies with a cover note that labeled him “this arch traitor.” Public hopes for reconciliation ascended, then subsided, only to rise again. The stock market jumped in late December on false news that he and Lord North had reached a peace deal.

But there would be no peace. These febrile efforts, he wrote, “availed no more than the whistling of the winds.” While government officials considered him the “great director” of New England radicals, the radicals themselves wondered if he was “too much of an Englishman.” He felt “like a thing out of its place, and useless because it is out of its place.” Like many Americans, he found that the middle ground was narrow and perilous; he, too, gradually chose insurrection. Britain, he concluded, had become “this old rotten state.” He was reduced to quoting from Horace’s Odes: “What is bad now may not always be.”

Franklin spent his final night on Craven Street. The last of his books, papers, and scientific instruments packed, he caught the post coach for Portsmouth on March 21. Beyond the political turmoil, two personal matters gnawed at him as he rolled through Surrey on a route similar to that taken by the king to the dockyards twenty-one months earlier. In New Jersey, Governor William Franklin, the great man’s son, seemed intent on remaining loyal to the Crown. “You, who are a thorough courtier,” Franklin wrote in a letter, “see everything with government eyes.” And in Philadelphia, his common-law wife of forty-four years, Deborah, had died in December after a long decline. Although a faithful correspondent, Franklin had not seen her in a decade. Regret and perhaps guilt dogged him up the gangplank onto the Pennsylvania Packet, moored along the Portsmouth waterfront.

Franklin never went to sea without vowing never to go again. Yet here he was in his seventieth year, a large man in a small cabin on a small ship. He had resolved to stay busy during the passage, scrutinizing the heavens with his telescope and frequently measuring ocean temperatures with a thermometer suspended on a long rope, as part of his perpetual study of the Gulf Stream. He promptly started a letter to William, which began, “Dear Son” and grew to twenty thousand words on 250 foolscap pages, as it became a detailed account of his failed diplomacy in Britain. That failure had taught him lessons in patience, tact, intrigue, and power—lessons that would prove useful, since his best days as a diplomat, perhaps the greatest America ever produced, still lay ahead of him.

The bells of Philadelphia would ring for joy upon his arrival six weeks hence. The man who had felt “like a thing out of place” would find his rightful place. Among the slurs hurled at him in the Cockpit was the accusation of being a “true incendiary.” That much was certain, as befitted the American Prometheus. He was the best of his breed, this kite flier, this almanac maker, this lightning tamer. The Pennsylvania Packet shrugged off her moorings and crowded on sail, bearing him home, where he belonged.

Part One

1.
God Himself Our Captain

BOSTON, MARCH 6—APRIL 17, 1775

The mildest winter in living memory had yielded to an early spring. Not once had the Charles River iced over, and even now whispers of green could be seen on the Common sward and across the tumbling hills to the north. By reducing the need for firewood, this “extraordinary weather for warlike preparations,” as one pugnacious clergyman called it, had preserved Boston from even greater suffering in the nine months since British warships had closed the port. Still, warehouses stood vacant, shipyards idle, wharves deserted, shop shelves barren. The only topsail vessels in view were the eight Royal Navy men-of-war plugging the harbor approaches. “It is now a very gloomy place, the streets almost empty,” a woman wrote an English friend in early March 1775. “Many families have removed from it, & the inhabitants are divided.… Some appear desponding, others full of rage.”

Only a bountiful local crop of lambs and charity from other colonies preserved Boston from hunger: fish and flour from elsewhere in New England, rice from the Carolinas, rye from Baltimore, a thousand bushels of wheat from Quebec, cash from Delaware and Montreal. By British decree, provisions arriving by sea were unloaded in Marblehead and carted twenty miles to Boston, an expensive, tedious detour. Town selectmen launched projects to employ the unemployed—street paving, well digging, building a new brickyard. But gangs of idle sailors, longshoremen, ropemakers, riggers, and carpenters could often be found loitering by the docks or in the town’s ninety taverns.

Even in better days, Boston had known ample misery—smallpox and measles epidemics, Quaker and witch hangings. For the past three decades the population had stagnated at fifteen thousand people, all of them wedged into a pear-shaped, thousand-acre peninsula with seventeen churches, no banks, no theaters, and a single concert hall, in a room above a shop. Puritan severity was not far removed. A generation earlier, both actors and theatergoers could be fined for “immorality, impiety, and a contempt for religion”; other miscreants were branded alphabetically—“A” for adulterers, “B” for burglars, “F” for forgers. Counterfeiters who escaped a scorching “C” might be nailed to the pillory by their ears. But never had the town seemed more abject or more menacing; these days there were as many British soldiers in Boston as adult male civilians. One resident watching the regiments at drill lamented that the Common “glows with warlike red.”

On Monday morning, March 6, the “gloomy place” abruptly sprang to life. Hundreds and then thousands filled the streets, most of them walking, since by ordinance no carriage or wagon could be driven at speeds faster than “foot pace” without risk of a ten-shilling fine. The annual commemoration of the 1770 Boston Massacre would be held a day late this year to avoid profaning the Sabbath, and Dr. Joseph Warren, a prominent local physician, intended to deliver a speech titled “The Baleful Influence of Standing Armies in Time of Peace.” An “immense concourse of people,” as one witness described it, made for Milk and Marlborough Streets, where an octagonal steeple rose 180 feet above the Old South Meeting House, with its distinctive Flemish-bond brick walls, enormous clock, and split-banner weathervane. By eleven a.m., five thousand packed the place to the double rafters and cambered tie beams. More than a hundred box pews filled Old South’s floor, with high paneled sides to block chilly drafts and wooden writing arms for those inclined to take notes on the day’s sermon. An upper gallery with benches wrapped around the second floor. Between the arched compass-headed windows rose a high pulpit, now draped in black and crowned with a sounding board.

“People’s expectations are alive for the oration,” the lawyer John Adams had recently written. An uneasy murmur rose from the congregants, along with the smell of damp wool, perspiration, and badly tanned shoe leather. It was rumored that mass arrests were likely this morning, and that British officers had agreed that if the king were insulted they would draw swords and slaughter the offenders. “We may possibly be attacked in our trenches,” Samuel Adams had warned, and a witness reported that almost every man in attendance “had a short stick, or bludgeon in his hand.” The murmur in Old South grew louder when several dozen red-coated officers clumped through the door and stood in the aisles.

Samuel Adams was ready for them. An undistinguished petty official who had squandered a family malthouse fortune, Adams ran an impressive political organization, deftly shaping public opinion through a newspaper syndicate that for years had told other colonies—often with lurid hyperbole—what life was like in a free town occupied by combat troops. “He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much,” an adversary later wrote, “and is most decisive and indefatigable.” Now fifty-two and afflicted with a pronounced tremor in his head and hands, he often stood on his toes when excited, and surely he was on his toes now. He quickly cleared the front pews and beckoned the officers so that, as he later explained, they “might have no pretense to behave ill.” About forty eventually took seats on the forward benches or the pulpit stairs, while Adams settled into a deacon’s chair, within sword thrust.

The crowd hushed when Dr. Warren appeared at the pulpit after sidling through the congested aisles. He was handsome and young, just thirty-three, pitied for having recently lost his wife, who’d left him four young children, yet much admired for his kindness, grace, and medical skill; more than a few of those in the audience had been inoculated by him during the smallpox outbreak a decade before. He was also a ringleader. As chairman of the extralegal Committee of Safety, he proved to be a capable organizer and insurgent strategist. John Adams, the previous day, had praised his “undaunted spirit and fire.”

Later accounts would depict Warren wearing a white toga over his breeches, symbolic of antique virtues—simplicity, industry, probity, civic good over private interest. Although the doctor was likely dressed more conventionally, he did affect what was described as a “Demosthenian posture,” with a handkerchief in his right hand, as he addressed “my ever honored fellow citizens”:

Unhappily for us, unhappily for Britain, the madness of an avaricious minister … has brought upon the stage discord, envy, hatred, and revenge, with civil war close in their rear.… Our streets are again filled with armed men. Our harbor is crowded with ships of war. But these cannot intimidate us. Our liberty must be preserved. It is far dearer than life.

Warren invoked the long struggle to carve a country from the New England wilderness. He described Britain’s recent efforts to assert hegemony over that country, and the shootings five years before that left “the stones bespattered with your father’s brains.” Then came the Coercive Acts, insult upon injury. “Our wish is that Britain and the colonies may, like the oak and the ivy, grow and increase in strength together,” Warren said. “But if these pacific measures are ineffectual, and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will not turn your faces from your foes.”

Several British officers hissed and rapped their sticks on the floor in disapproval. A captain sitting on the pulpit steps allegedly held up several lead bullets in his open palm, a menacing gesture.

Although one skeptic would describe the oration as “true puritanical whine,” Dr. Warren knew his audience: farmers and merchants, seamen and artisans, with their queued hair, knee buckles, and linen shirts ruffled at the cuff, their pale, upturned faces watching him intently. They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall. They were patriots—if that term implied political affiliation rather than a moral state of grace—who were disputatious and litigious, given to violence on the frontier and in the street: a gentle people they were not. Their disgruntlement now approached despair, with seething resentments and a conviction that designing, corrupt men in London—the king’s men, if not the king himself—conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, “panting for an explosion.”

Reasonably democratic, reasonably egalitarian, wary of privilege and outsiders, they were accustomed to tending their own affairs, choosing their own ministers, militia officers, and political leaders. Convinced that their elected assemblies were equal in stature and authority to Parliament, they believed that governance by consent was paramount. They had not consented to being taxed, to being occupied, to seeing their councils dismissed and their port sealed like a graveyard crypt. They were godly, of course, placed here by the Almighty to do His will. Sometimes political strife was also a moral contest between right and wrong, good and evil. This struggle, as the historian Gordon S. Wood later wrote, would prove their blessedness.

Warren circled round to that very point:

Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful, but we have many friends, determining to be free.… On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.

Applause rocked Old South. One British lieutenant would denounce “a most seditious, inflammatory harangue,” although another concluded that the speech “contained nothing so violent as was expected.” Swords remained sheathed. But when Samuel Adams heaved himself from his chair to move that “the thanks of the town should be presented to Dr. Warren for his elegant and spirited oration,” the officers answered with more hisses, more stick rapping, and shouts of “Oh, fie! Fie!”

That was but a consonant removed from “fire.” Panic swept the meetinghouse, “a scene of the greatest confusion imaginable,” Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie told his diary. Women shrieked, men shouted, “Fire!,” sniffing for smoke. Others thought a command to shoot had been issued, an error compounded by the trill and rap of fifes and drums from the 43rd Regiment, which happened to be passing in the street outside. Five thousand people tried “getting out as fast as they could by the doors and windows,” wrote Lieutenant John Barker of the 4th Regiment of Foot. The nimbler congregants in the galleries “swarmed down gutters like rats,” then hied through Coopers Alley, Cow Lane, and Queen Street.

A tense calm finally returned to a tense town. “To be sure,” Ensign Jeremy Lister of the 10th Foot later wrote, “the scene was quite laughable.”

Across the street from Old South, in the three-story brick mansion called Province House, Lieutenant General Gage was not laughing. Worried that the morning’s oration would turn violent, he had placed his regiments under arms and on alert. The risible stampede came as a relief.

Thomas Gage was a mild, sensible man with a mild, sensible countenance; only a slight protrusion of his lower lip suggested truculence. Now in his mid-fifties, with thinning gray hair and a fixed gaze, he was the most powerful authority in North America as both military commander in chief and the royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Comrades knew him as “Honest Tom,” and even an adversary conceded that he was “a good and wise man surrounded with difficulties.” As a young officer he had seen ghastly combat in the British defeat by the French at Fontenoy in 1745 and in the British victory over rebellious Highlanders at Culloden a year later. In 1755, he led the vanguard of General Edward Braddock’s expedition against the French in western Pennsylvania, where a disastrous ambush at the Monongahela River killed his commander and several hundred comrades; swarming bullets grazed Gage’s belly and eyebrow, ventilated his coat, and twice wounded his horse. Three years later, Gage was a senior commander when the French battered a British expedition in New York at Fort Carillon, subsequently renamed Ticonderoga. These actions revealed a soldier without conspicuous gifts as a combat leader, a man perhaps meant to administer rather than command. It was Gage’s misfortune to live in turbulent times.

Even so, twenty years of American service had been good to him, providing Gage with high rank, a comely American wife—the New Jersey heiress Margaret Kemble—and vast tracts of land in New York, Canada, and the West Indies. He evinced little sympathy for American political experiments. “Democracy is too prevalent in America,” he had declared in 1772, when his headquarters was in New York.

The tea party had pushed his lower lip out a bit more. In an uncharacteristic fit of bravado during a return visit to London in February 1774, he assured King George that four regiments in Boston should suffice—perhaps two thousand men—since the Americans would be “lions whilst we are lambs” but would turn “very meek” in the face of British resolve. Other colonies were unlikely to support Massachusetts; southerners especially “talk very high,” but the fear of slave rebellions and Indian attacks “will always keep them quiet.” The thirteen colonies seemed too geographically scattered and too riven by diverse interests to collaborate effectively. Promises of suppression on the cheap appealed to the shilling pinchers in Lord North’s government. Gage’s views had also helped shape the Coercive Acts by feeding the pleasant delusion in Britain that insurrection was mostly a Boston phenomenon, organized by a small cabal of ambitious cynics able to gull the masses.

Gage’s report so encouraged the king and his court that the general was dispatched to Massachusetts as both governor of the colony and military chief of the continent. Respectful Bostonians had greeted him with an honor guard, banners, and toasts in Faneuil Hall, although two weeks later he shifted his headquarters to Salem, upon closing Boston Harbor at noon on June 1, 1774. His marching orders from the government urged him “to quiet the minds of the people, to remove their prejudices, and, by mild and gentle persuasion to induce … submission on their part.” He imposed neither martial law nor press censorship. Troublemakers were permitted to assemble, to travel, to drill their militias, to fling bellicose insults at the king’s regulars.

Gage had evidently learned little on the Monongahela or at Fort Carillon about the hazard of underestimating his adversaries; precisely what he had absorbed from two decades in America was unclear. But within weeks of planting his flag in Salem, he recognized that he had misjudged both the depth and the breadth of rebellion. The Coercive Acts, including the abrogation of colonial government in Massachusetts, had inflamed the insurrection. One ugly incident followed another. In mid-August, fifteen hundred insurgents prevented royal judges and magistrates from taking the bench in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. Two weeks later, Gage sent foot troops to seize munitions from the provincial powder house, six miles northwest of Boston; rumors spread that the king’s soldiers and sailors were butchering Bostonians. At least twenty thousand rebels marched toward the town with firelocks, cudgels, and plowshares beaten into edged weapons. “For about fifty miles each way round, there was an almost universal ferment, rising, seizing arms,” wrote one clergyman. An Irish merchant described how “at every house women & children [were] making cartridges” and pouring molten lead into bullet molds. The insurgents found Boston unbruised and the British regulars back in their fortified camps, but the “Powder Alarm” emboldened the Americans, demonstrated the militancy of bumpkins in farms and villages across the colony, and revealed how crippled the Crown’s authority had become. “Popular rage has appeared,” Gage advised London.

Additional episodes followed. More than four thousand militiamen lined the main street in Worcester in early September, closing the royal courts and requiring two dozen officials to walk a quarter-mile gantlet, hats in hand, each recanting his loyalty to the Crown thirty times, aloud. A Massachusetts Provincial Congress convened in Salem in early October 1774 to elect the wealthy merchant John Hancock as president—a vain, petulant “empty barrel,” in John Adams’s estimation. Of more than two hundred Massachusetts communities, only twenty-one failed to send delegates. Like similar congresses soon established in other colonies, this extralegal assembly acted as a provisional government to circumvent British authority by passing resolutions, collecting revenue, and coordinating colonial affairs with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

Amassing military supplies and making other martial preparations were entrusted to the Committee of Safety, led by Dr. Warren. Such committees in Massachusetts and other colonies enforced loyalty oaths, stigmatized ideological opponents, and compelled fence straddlers to make hard choices. In December, rebel raiders seized forty-four British cannons on Fort Island in Rhode Island. Two days later, several hundred men stormed a fortress in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, overpowered the six-man garrison, snatched nearly a hundred barrels of powder from the magazine, and lowered the British flag. A day later they returned to haul away sixteen cannons and sixty muskets.

Fearing for his own safety, Gage had abandoned Salem for Province House in Boston in late summer. Set back from Marlborough Street, with broad stone steps and the royal coat of arms affixed over the front door, the house featured wall tapestries, an iron fence, and ancient shade trees. Atop the eight-sided cupola swiveled a weathervane of hammered copper—a glass-eyed Indian in a feathered bonnet, drawing his bow and “bedazzling the eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of the sun,” as a local author named Nathaniel Hawthorne would later write.

From his high-ceilinged study, Gage had sent a volley of gloomy dispatches to London that fall. “Civil government is near its end,” he warned in September, revoking his earlier optimism. “Conciliating, moderation, reasoning is over. Nothing can be done but by forcible means.” To Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary, he expressed shock “that the country people could have been raised to such a pitch of phrenzy.” American farmers for the past decade had generally been more restrained than their urban brethren in protesting British rule, but they now seemed just as bellicose; the imperial insult of closing the Boston port had proved especially offensive to them. Militia companies were training intensely; some had formed quick-reaction units called “minute men,” who reportedly carried their muskets even to church. The “disease” of insurrection, Gage wrote, had become “so universal there is no knowing where to apply a remedy.” Connecticut had ordered six militia regiments equipped for active service. Companies were drilling in New Hampshire and Rhode Island, and every county in Virginia was said to be arming soldiers. In obedience to the Continental Congress’s declared boycott of British goods, thousands of provincials would soon serve on local committees throughout the colonies, enforcing the ban and rooting out “enemies of American liberty” with threats, public scoldings, and violence. As local assemblies and committees of safety grew stronger, royal governors grew weaker. To Barrington, the secretary at war, Gage pleaded in November, “If you think ten thousand men sufficient, send twenty. If one million is thought enough, give two. You will save both blood and treasure in the end.”

Perhaps, he advised London, the Coercive Acts should be lifted as a conciliatory gesture. The king, appalled, replied that the “idea of suspending the acts appears to me the most absurd that can be suggested.” Lord North insisted that “the acts must and should be carried into execution.” While the government assembled reinforcements for Boston, including more generals, Gage’s reputation sagged. There was muttering in England about the “lukewarm coward” in Massachusetts. His king referred to him as “the mild general,” and his own soldiers now called him “Old Woman” behind his back. A senior officer concluded that “his disposition and manners are too gentle for the rough, republican fanatic people.” Certainly there would be no more toasts and honor guards from those rough Americans. Instead, Gage effigies burned in bonfires. He was accused of papism, drunkenness, and even pederasty, as in a lewd verse that ended, “I’m informed by the innkeepers, / He’ll bung with shoeboys, chimney sweepers.” On the last day of 1774, Barrington wrote, “I pity, dear sir, the situation you are in.”

The new year brought only new troubles. “Every day, every hour, widens the breach,” Dr. Warren warned. On Sunday, February 26, barely a week before the Old South oration, Gage sent 240 regulars by naval transport from Boston across Massachusetts Bay to Marblehead, where they marched in a red column four miles northwest to Salem in search of rebel cannons while most local citizens were in church. A militia colonel burst into the North Meeting House, shouting, “The regulars are coming!” A raised drawbridge over the North River delayed the column; insurgents perched on the uptilted span like roosting chickens as “a vast multitude” soon assembled to heckle the troops as “lobstercoats” and to vow that “if you fire you will all be dead men.” After ninety minutes, a compromise ended the standoff: the bridge was lowered, the troops tramped across, and after precisely 30 rods—165 yards—they made a smart about-face, as agreed, and returned to Boston empty-handed. “Go home,” a young nurse named Sarah Tarrant barked from an open window, and “tell your master he has sent you on a fool’s errand.”

Gage could only agree. His governance reached no farther than could be seen through the glass eyes of the weathervane Indian above him, and his command was limited to the troops assembled within the sound of his voice on the Common. He expected imminent orders from London “to act offensively” since, as he readily acknowledged, “to keep quiet in the town of Boston only will not terminate affairs. The troops must march into the country.” But in a dispatch written in early March, he warned the government of insurgent legions “actuated by an enthusiasm wild and ungovernable.” American “bushmen,” he added, had demonstrated “their patience and cunning in forming ambushments.”

London promised to send him a hospital, “on a large scale.”

The six weeks following Dr. Warren’s oration were suffused with “dread suspense,” as the Reverend William Emerson of Concord later wrote. Yet daily life plodded on. Goods smuggled or stockpiled before the port closing could be found for a price, including candles for five shillings a pound in the Faneuil Hall market, along with indigo and a few hogsheads of sugar. Greenleaf’s Auction Room sold German serges, Irish linens, and Kippen’s snuff by the cask. Harbottle Dorr’s shop in Union Street advertised spades, Smith’s anvils, and brass kettles, “none of which have been imported since the port was shut up.” A vendor near Swing Bridge offered fish hooks, cod lines, and “nails of all sorts.” With spring coming on fast, W. P. Bartlett’s shop in Salem sold seeds for crimson radishes, yellow Spanish onions, tennisball lettuce, and several kinds of peas, including black-eyed, sugar, blue union, and speckled. “Choice cayenne cocoa” could be found on Hancock’s Wharf, and pearl dentifrice—reputedly invented by the queen’s dentist “for the preservation of the teeth”—was peddled in a shop on Ann Street. The London Book-Store in Cornhill, owned by gregarious young Henry Knox, offered lottery tickets and globes showing the reach of that empire on which the sun never set. For four pence on Marlborough Street, those desperate to glimpse a brighter tomorrow could buy a calculator that displayed the projected annual increase of colonial populations in America.

Auction houses sold the furniture of distraught residents determined to move—to England, to Halifax, deeper into New England, or just away. Mahogany tables, featherbeds, and looking glasses went for a song. For those who preferred to dance away their troubles, an unlikely new school in Boston offered lessons in minuets, hornpipes, and English country steps “in the most improved taste.” The Boston Gazette, known to loyalists as “the Weekly Dung Barge,” reminded readers that lofty talk of freedom had limits: a March 6 advertisement touted “a healthy Negro girl, about 20 years of age.… She is remarkably good-natured and fond of children.… Her price is £40.” Another ad offered a reward for a runaway “servant for life,” using the Massachusetts euphemism for a slave; this one, named Caesar, “is supposed to be strolling about in some of the neighboring towns. Walks lame and talks much of being free.… Had on when he went away a blue jacket.” A Boston ordinance required the night watch “to take up all Negroes, Indians, and mulatto slaves that may be absent from their master’s house after nine o’clock at night,” unless they carried a lighted lantern and could account for themselves.

Freeholders gathered for meetings, as usual, in Faneuil Hall. The town agreed to borrow £600 to buy grain for the almshouse poor. A report in late March noted that thirty-eight smallpox patients were quarantined on a hospital scow in the Charles River, “some distance from the wharf.” Freeholders voted to continue a recent ban on inoculation; many now feared that it posed a greater risk of epidemic than natural infection. Any household with sick inhabitants was required to display a large red flag on a six-foot pole or incur a £50 fine. For those intent on inoculation, newspapers advertised the services of a private hospital in New York.

Friction between patriots and loyalists intensified. Hundreds of Tories, as they often were called with a sneer, arrived from the provinces to seek the king’s protection in Boston. The “once happy town” was now “a cage for every unclean bird,” in Mrs. Samuel Adams’s estimation. “Humbling the Tories” had become a blood sport in Massachusetts Bay, with excrement smeared on houses or dumped through open windows, with severed sheep’s heads tossed into open chaises, or with loyalists locked in smokehouses—the chimney flues obstructed—until they renounced the Crown. A tavern keeper in South Danvers was forced to recite in public, “I, Isaac Wilson, a Tory I be, / I, Isaac Wilson, I sells tea.” A radical Presbyterian cleric thanked God from the pulpit for “sufficient hemp in the colonies to hang all the Tories,” while a loyalist woman hoped someday soon to be riding through rebel blood to the hubs of her carriage wheels. Small wonder that a Falmouth minister believed the colony was suffering “a discontent bordering on madness.”

A Calvinist people marinated in the doctrine of predestination braced for the inevitable, and preparations for war continued apace. Clandestine military cargo had arrived all winter from Hamburg, Holland, even London, smuggled through a hundred coves and stored in a thousand barns. The Simsbury Iron Works in Connecticut cast cannonballs. Salem women secretly cut and stitched five thousand flannel powder cartridges for field guns. The provincial congress, meeting first in Cambridge and then in Concord, ordered enough military stores amassed for fifteen thousand militiamen: canteens, bell tents, field tents, Russian linen, wooden spoons. By April, the provincial stockpile included 21,549 firelocks, nine tons of gunpowder, eleven tons of cannonballs, ten thousand bayonets, 145,000 flints. Fifteen medicine chests, purchased for £500 from Boston apothecaries, contained opium, liquid laudanum, emetics, mercurial ointments, tourniquets, and a trepan for boring holes in a skull to relieve pressure from an injured brain. Dr. Warren would distribute the chests among seven towns by mid-April, including two sent to Concord.

Farm carts hauled ammunition and powder kegs down country lanes, to be hidden in attics or buried in new-plowed furrows, along with those radish and onion seeds. British soldiers searching a countryman’s wagon in mid-March seized more than a ton of musket balls and over thirteen thousand musket cartridges stacked in candle boxes; the teamster insisted that the munitions were for his private use. But most shipments went undiscovered. In Concord a militia colonel, James Barrett, listed more than three dozen caches in his notebooks—including rice, ammunition, axes, oatmeal, and wood-bladed shovels rimmed with iron shoes. As ordered by the provincial Committee of Supply, he appointed “faithful men” to guard the stocks, with teams ready “by day and night, on the shortest notice” to haul the matériel away as required.

The provincial congress also chose five militia generals and approved a system for alerting the colony with mounted couriers in moments of peril. Several dozen articles of war were adopted; the first two required soldiers to attend church and to avoid profane oaths, with a fine of four shillings per cuss for officers, less for privates. Virtually every white male from sixteen to sixty in Massachusetts was required to serve under arms. “The parson as well as the squire stands in the ranks with a firelock,” a Boston merchant wrote. Instead of exercising once every three months, many companies now met three times a week. An Essex County militia colonel, Timothy Pickering, simplified the manual of arms with his Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia, which would be widely adopted. Muskets could be primed and loaded with one order and ten motions. “Lean the cheek against the butt of the firelock,” the Easy Plan instructed. “Shut the left eye, and look with the right along the barrel.”

Each company elected its own officers, but at a militia gathering in March, Reverend Emerson drew from the Second Book of Chronicles to remind the men of Concord who really led them: “Behold, God himself is with us for our captain.”

Boston’s natural beauty had once beguiled British soldiers. “The entrance to the harbor, and the view of the town of Boston from it, is the most charming thing I ever saw,” an officer wrote home in 1774. That enchantment had faded by the spring of 1775. “No such thing as a play house,” a lieutenant in the 23rd Foot complained. “They [are] too puritanical to admit such lewd diversions, though there’s perhaps no town of its size could turn out more whores than this could.” A captain in the 38th Foot told his brother in Ireland, “The people here and we are on bad terms, ready to cut one another’s throats.” Small insults bred seething resentments. All it took was an overbearing British customs official, mud flung at a fusilier on the street, or a fistfight over a girl between a “Jonathan”—a rebellious American, in British slang—and a lobstercoat.

A Royal Navy officer described seeing miniature effigies of British soldiers hanging by nooses from roadside trees, each wearing a tiny red coat. In March, a marine lieutenant reported how passing Bostonians made coarse gestures with their hands on their backsides. For their part, devout colonists resented regulars dishonoring the Sabbath by ice-skating across a Roxbury pond; they also loathed British Army profanity, which dated at least to the Hundred Years’ War, when English bowmen were known as “Goddams.” Major John Pitcairn, the marine commander in Boston, advised the Admiralty in March, “One active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights. Nothing now, I am convinced, but this will ever convince these foolish bad people that England is in earnest.”

The British garrison now exceeded five thousand, of whom more than four-fifths were soldiers, gunners, and marines in thirteen regiments. They crowded every corner of the town: artillerymen billeted in warehouses on Griffin’s Wharf, the 4th Regiment of Foot—known as the King’s Own—in a vacant distillery in West Boston, the 64th Foot in Castle William on a harbor island, the 43rd Foot on Back Street. Troops drilled in Brattle Square and on the Common, throwing stones to drive away the cows and avoiding the burial ground that held the graves of a hundred comrades dead from disease and mischance. Regiments took target practice on the wharves, six to ten rounds for each soldier, firing at river flotsam or at man-size figures cut from thin boards. A physician visiting from Virginia told his diary of watching light infantry exercises in late March, “young active fellows” who loaded firelocks while lying on their backs, then flipped over to fire from their bellies. “They run out in parties on the wings of the regiment,” he added. “They secure their retreat & defend their front while they are forming.”

Ugly encounters between Jonathans and lobstercoats multiplied. Officers mocked the Old South oration with a parody delivered from a coffeehouse balcony in “the most vile, profane, blackguard language,” a witness reported. In mid-March, soldiers from the King’s Own pitched tents within ten yards of a meetinghouse and played drums and fifes throughout the worship service; troops later vandalized John Hancock’s elegant house facing the Common. A peddler from Billerica named Thomas Ditson, Jr., who was accused by British soldiers of trying to buy old uniforms and a musket from the 47th Regiment, was stripped, tarred, feathered, and paraded from Foster’s Wharf through King Street while a fifer played “The Rogue’s March.” A placard labeled “AMERICAN LIBERTY” was draped around his neck. “It gave great offense to the people of the town,” a British officer wrote, “and was much disapproved of by General Gage.”

The indiscipline of a bored, anxious army weighed on Gage. Gambling had become so pernicious that he imposed wager limits and established the Anti-Gambling Club. Worse still was inebriation in a town awash with cheap liquor. Regulars preferred West Indies rum, although it was often contaminated with lead, but 140 American distilleries also produced almost five million gallons a year, which sold for less than two shillings a gallon. “The rum is so cheap that it debauches both navy and army, and kills many of them,” Major Pitcairn, the marine, warned the Admiralty in March. “It will destroy more of us than the Yankees will.” A soldier caught trading his musket for a jug of New England Kill-Devil could draw five hundred lashes with a nine-cord cat, enough to lay bare the ribs and kidneys. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd Foot—the Royal Welch Fusiliers—recorded in his diary that many men “are intoxicated daily” and that two had died of alcohol poisoning in a single night. “When the soldiers are in a state of intoxication,” he added, “they are frequently induced to desert.”

And desert they did. Drunk or sober, redcoats were lured by Americans who offered farm-smock disguises, escape horses, and three hundred acres to any absconding regular. Estimates of British Army desertions over the past year ranged from 120 to more than 200. Five-guinea rewards were advertised by company officers in the Boston Post-Boy for the likes of Private Will Gibbs, “about 5 feet 7 inches high, and of a fair complexion,” last seen wearing a round hat and a brown coat trimmed in blue. The problem was even worse for naval captains: more than twenty thousand British seamen had jumped ship in American ports since early in the century, and nearly another eighty thousand—almost 14 percent of all jack-tars who served—would abscond during the coming war, including those who deserted in home waters. Many had been forced into service by press gangs, while some detested the harsh life at sea; all resented the paltry nineteen shillings a month paid seamen since the reign of Charles II. Boston was particularly notorious for desertion, and the Royal Navy ships now blockading the harbor had remained at anchor through the winter with their gunports caulked and their topmasts housed against the weather, unable to berth for fear of mass defections.

Floggings, and worse, had limited deterrence. Private Valentine Duckett, barely twenty-one, had been sentenced to die after a three-day trial for desertion in the fall. “I am now to finish a life, which by the equitable law of my country, I just forfeited,” he told his comrades while being lashed to a stake on the beach below the Common. A six-man firing squad botched the job even at eight yards’ range, but after a coup de grâce to the head, the entire army was ordered to march “in a slow, solemn step” to view Private Duckett in his coffin. Private William Ferguson of the 10th Foot, a former tailor now dressed in a white shroud, suffered a similar fate on December 24. The execution, a lieutenant observed, was “the only thing done in remembrance of Christmas.” On March 13, Gage commuted the death sentence of Private Robert Vaughan, but after more soldiers deserted the next day, the high command announced that this would be “the last man he will pardon.” Vaughan took advantage of his reprieve to flee again a month later, this time without getting caught.

By contrast, many young British officers hankered for action. Among them was a tall, dark-eyed captain in the King’s Own, the eldest son of a vicar from County Antrim. William Glanville Evelyn, now thirty-three and still unmarried, had a shark-fin nose, a dimpled chin, and the faint spatter of smallpox scars across his cheeks. He had soldiered for the king since the age of eighteen and was ever alert for the patron and cash needed to secure his next promotion; most army commissions came with a price tag, ensuring that only the better sort filled the officer ranks. (A lieutenant colonelcy in a foot regiment might cost £3,500.) In one of the sixteen surviving letters he would write from America, Evelyn assured his father that he was “pretty well known” to General Gage and that other senior officers in Boston had been “very civil to me.” The 4th Foot—raised a century earlier and designated the King’s Own to honor George I in 1714—was serving the empire at a critical moment in a vital place. To properly dress the part, Evelyn had asked that a Bedford Street cloth merchant in London send out scarlet, white, and blue material for two new uniforms, plus “the proper quantity of regimental buttons,” a pair of epaulettes, and two hats “with silver buttons.”

Nine months of duty in Boston had showed young Glanville Evelyn that a New England posting was not all hardship and tedium. “We get plenty of turtle, pineapple, and Madeira,” he wrote. “The weather is delightful beyond description.” Yet his contempt for the Americans had increased week by week. “There does not exist so great a set of rascals and poltroons,” he told his father a month after arriving in Boston. By October 1774, he had concluded that “a civil war must inevitably happen in the course of a few months, or Great Britain might forever give up America.” By December he fully shared his government’s conviction that “a few enterprising, ambitious demagogues” had incited the insurrection; moreover, he believed that many thousands of loyalists were “inclined to our side,” though they would not “openly declare themselves” until the Crown asserted its full authority. “Never,” he wrote, “did any nation so much deserve to be made an example of to future ages.” As his soldiers practiced their sharpshooting and beat their drums to annoy the Jonathans, Evelyn’s greatest worry was that “unsteadiness” in Lord North’s ministry might lead to a political settlement that spared the Americans from imperial wrath. “We only fear they will avail themselves of the clemency and generosity of the English,” he wrote a cousin in London, “and evade the chastisement due to unexampled villainy, and which we are so impatiently waiting to inflict.”

With the early arrival of spring, the chances of a pernicious peace faded. Captain Evelyn was glad. Blood had risen in his gorge. “The hour is now very nigh in which this affair will be brought to a crisis,” he told his father. “The resolutions we expect are by this time upon the water, which are to determine the fate of Great Britain and America.… We shall shortly receive such orders as will authorize us to scourge the rebellion with rods of iron.” As usual, he signed his letter, “Yours ever affectionate, W.G.E.”

The expected orders arrived on Friday, April 14, when a burly, flush-faced dragoon captain bounded into Boston from the Nautilus. He had been sent ahead to Massachusetts to buy mounts for his regiment, now following on the high seas from Ireland, but his first task was to deliver a sealed dispatch marked “SECRET” to Province House. Striding past the budding elms and up the broad front steps beneath the gaze of the copper Indian on the roof, the captain handed over the document, saluted, and wandered off to look at horseflesh.

Upon breaking the seal, Gage found a twenty-four-paragraph letter from Lord Dartmouth, the Psalm Singer, written with the cocksure clarity of a man who slept in his own bed every night three thousand miles from trouble. Drafted on January 27, in consultation with the king and North’s cabinet, the order had remained in Dartmouth’s desk for weeks while events played out in London, including those futile conversations with Dr. Franklin, Parliament’s minuet with the monarch at St. James’s Palace, and the introduction of more punitive legislation. Further weeks passed while ill-tempered westerly gales kept Nautilus and her companion sloop Falcon pinned to the south coast of England. But at last the fatal command had arrived:

The violences committed by those who have taken up arms in Massachusetts have appeared to me as the acts of a rude rabble, without concert, without conduct; and therefore I think that a small force now, if put to the test, would be able to conquer them.… It is the opinion of the King’s servants, in which His Majesty concurs, that the essential step to be taken toward reestablishing government would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors and abettors in the provincial congress, whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion.

There was more: reinforcements were en route, though hardly the twenty thousand that Gage thought necessary. Twice Dartmouth conceded that “your own judgment and discretion” must shape any operation; yet, with proper preparation and secrecy, “it can hardly fail of success, and will perhaps be accomplished without bloodshed.… Any efforts on their part to encounter a regular force cannot be very formidable.” It was agreed in London that Gage had demonstrated restraint to the point of lamentable indulgence; now he must be firm, come what may. “The king’s dignity and the honor and safety of the empire require that in such a situation, force should be repelled by force.”

Although clear enough, this dispatch from Dartmouth was actually a duplicate. The original, with appended documents, was aboard the Falcon, and Gage, ever scrupulous, ever cautious, would await that vessel’s arrival in Boston before striking. Meanwhile, there was plenty to do, and orders flew from Province House. Newly repaired navy longboats were to be lashed to the sterns of the Somerset, Boyne, and Asia for quick repositioning. The fortifications at Boston Neck, the slender isthmus leading into the town from Roxbury, would be double-checked for strength and security. Rumors were afoot that insurgents intended to burn Boston before British reinforcements arrived. A moat now stretched across the Neck, filled by each rising tide, and the defenses included a drawbridge, mud breastworks with walls twelve feet thick, wooden blockhouses, and more than twenty cannons.

Gage had no cavalry for a quick, bold strike into the countryside. Few enlisted regulars had ever heard a shot fired in anger, although a substantial number had been in uniform for five to ten years, or longer. The most agile and many of the strongest were grouped into elite light infantry and grenadier companies; regiments usually had one of each, typically with three dozen soldiers apiece. Forced to rely on infantry plodders, Gage ordered these elite troops relieved of their regular duties on Saturday, April 15, and formed into a makeshift brigade with twenty-one companies—eleven of grenadiers and ten of light infantry, some eight hundred men altogether. Gage, the man who had formed the Anti-Gambling Club, was betting that the advantage of concentrating these companies—with their skirmishing skills, marksmanship, and ferocity—would outweigh the disadvantage of severing them from their accustomed regiments and senior officers. Word of this improvisation quickly spread through Boston. “I dare say they have something for them to do,” Lieutenant Barker told his diary.

But what, and where? Small, daylong expeditions had marched beyond Boston repeatedly in recent weeks—five regiments here, two there, trampling grain fields, toppling fences, gathering intelligence, and, not least, spooking the Jonathans. Gage also had dispatched officers “capable of taking sketches of a country.” Dressed in country clothes—the disguises fooled no one—British scouts wandered into Suffolk and Middlesex Counties with instructions to “mark out the roads and distances from town to town.” They also were to note the depth and breadth of rivers, to determine the steepness of creek banks, and to assess whether various churchyards “are advantageous spots to take post in, and capable of being made defensible.”

Gage also had a clandestine espionage network. Through American spies on the British payroll, he knew that militia generals had been appointed. He knew that several dozen men, mostly artisans and mechanics, routinely met at the Green Dragon Tavern, a two-story brick building with symmetrical chimneys, to coordinate surveillance of British troop movements; at each meeting they swore themselves to secrecy on a Bible. Further, Gage had been told that mounted rebel couriers could quickly rouse 7,500 minutemen, and that caches of military stores were hidden in Worcester, Watertown, and other settlements. Even so, he doubted the Americans had a field marshal “capable of taking the command or directing the motions of an army.”

That steady gaze of his had fixed on Concord, said to be the first village founded in Massachusetts Bay “beyond the sight and sound of the sea.” Eighteen miles from Boston and now home to 265 families, it was a place where church attendance was compulsory, where the provincial congress sometimes met, and where, according to Gage’s spies, munitions and other war supplies had been secreted in bulk. He even had a hand-drawn map, crude but detailed, showing the houses, outbuildings, and other hiding places where caches could be found.

The Americans, too, had informants. Gage would complain that the rebels collected “good, full, and expeditious intelligence on all matters transacting in England.” Reports sent from London to patriot leaders warned of regiments preparing for deployment and of the blunt new instructions sent Gage. Since early April, many families had fled Boston for country refuges. Among the most prominent patriot leaders, only Dr. Warren remained in town. Samuel Adams and John Hancock had retired to Lexington, east of Concord. The provincial congress adjourned on April 15 for three weeks—entrusting the Committee of Safety to oversee military matters—and various false alarms kept the province on edge. Gage’s concentration of longboats, grenadiers, and light infantry companies hardly passed unremarked. “Some secret expedition,” one merchant noted, was no doubt afoot.

On Sunday, April 16, the Falcon glided into Boston Harbor. “In want of many men and stores, and very leaky” after her rough passage, as the Royal Navy reported, the sloop nonetheless carried Dartmouth’s original orders. Now Gage could complete his preparations. Using the discretion permitted him, he chose to ignore Dartmouth’s proposal of targeting “actors and abettors” like Hancock and Adams; chasing such scoundrels across the province seemed futile, if not capricious. A hard strike against the depot in Concord would be more fruitful, although disappointing late intelligence indicated that the cagey rebels had evacuated at least some military stocks to other sites. Opposition seemed unlikely except perhaps from scattered “parties of bushmen.”

Gage drafted a 319-word order for Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith of the 10th Foot, appointed to lead the strike brigade. If corpulent and edging toward retirement, Smith was mature, experienced, and prudent. He was to march “with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord,” Gage noted, adding,

You will seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms, and all military stores whatever. But you will take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants, or hurt private property.

The map enclosed with the order illustrated Gage’s demand that two bridges over the Concord River be secured by an advance “party of the best marchers.” Captured gunpowder and flour were to be dumped into the river, tents burned, salt pork and beef supplies destroyed. Enemy field guns should be spiked or ruined with sledgehammers. The expedition would carry a single day’s rations and no artillery; speed and surprise were essential. Sentries on horseback would be positioned to prevent rebel couriers from sounding an alarm.

Gage concluded his order without sentiment: “You will open your business and return with the troops as soon as possible.”

And now, as one loyalist wrote, “The war began to redden.… The iron was quite hot enough to be hammered.”

2.
Men Came Down from the Clouds

LEXINGTON AND CONCORD, APRIL 18–19, 1775

Shadows scuttled beneath the elm and linden trees along Boston Common. Hoarse whispers carried on the night air, along with the creak of leather and the clatter of a stone kicked down a lane. It would later be reported that a barking dog was bayoneted to enforce the silence. Not until the moon rose at ten p.m. on Tuesday, April 18, three nights past full but still radiant, did shape and color emerge from the hurrying gray figures to reveal hundreds of men in blood-red coats congregating on the beach near the town magazine, close to where Privates Duckett and Ferguson had been shot for desertion. Moonglow glinted off metal buttons and silvered the tall bearskin caps of the grenadiers. The soldiers reeked of damp wool and sweat, mingled with the tang of the brick dust and pipe clay used to scour brass and leather. Their hair had been greased, powdered, and clubbed into queues held with leather straps. The moon also gave tint to the facings on their uniform coats—purple or green, buff or royal blue, depending on the regiment from which each man had been plucked for the march to Concord.

The navy had collected only twenty longboats, and two lifts would be needed to shuttle all eight hundred men to marshy Lechmere Point, a mile distant across Back Bay. Sailors bent to their ash oars against the tide, and the standing soldiers swayed with every stroke. Each man’s kit included the eleven-pound Brown Bess, three dozen rounds of ammunition in a cartridge box, and a haversack to carry bread and salt pork. Beneath the heavy coats and crossbelts they wore wool waistcoats, white linen shirts, breeches buckled at the knee, and canvas or linen gaiters to keep pebbles from their low-topped brogans. Most wore black leather caps or felt hats with the brim stitched up to give a forepeak and two corners. Gorgets hung by neck cords at the officers’ throats—small silver or gilt crescents worn as an emblem of rank, a last remnant of medieval armor.

Loading was haphazard, and as the soldiers clambered from the boats to wade through the reeds on the far shore, sergeants hissed and clucked to reassemble the ten discomposed companies of light infantry and eleven of grenadiers. “We were wet up to the knees,” Lieutenant Barker later reported. Midnight had passed by the time the second lift arrived, and further delays followed as navy provisions in the boats were handed out—supplies that, Barker added, “most of the men threw away.” Fording a shallow inlet on the edge of Cambridge further wetted each shivering man to his waistcoat, but at last they reached the wide road leading west, unpaved except for napped stones and gravel shoveled into mud holes.

Few knew their destination. Two a.m. had come and gone as they put on speed. With their wet shoes squelching at more than a hundred steps per minute, their pace approached four miles an hour. Past apple and plum orchards they tramped, past smokehouses and cider mills and oblique driftways that led into cow pastures. The heavy footfall rattled pewter dishes on dressers and in cupboards, and an eight-year-old boy, awake when he should have been sleeping, later recalled a wondrous sight on the road outside his window: a long bobbing column of red, “like a flowing river,” sweeping northwest beneath the gibbous moon.

A brigade of armed men tiptoeing through Boston in the middle of the night had not gone unnoticed. “The town,” a British fusilier acknowledged, “was a good deal agitated.” Joseph Warren may have watched the mustering troops himself; he lived in a rented house on Hanover Street, barely a mile from the foot of the Common, and several companies had made for the boats from his North End neighborhood. Regardless, he was soon well informed. Two weeks earlier, the provincial congress had agreed that an enemy force greater than five hundred men leaving town with baggage and artillery ought to be considered a threat to the province and met by an assembled “army of observation … to act solely on the defensive so long as it can be justified.” This British force, even without heavy guns, was threatening enough for Dr. Warren. Before the first boats pulled off the Boston beach, he had summoned two couriers to carry the alarm to Samuel Adams and John Hancock, holed up in a Lexington parsonage, and to alert the wider countryside.

The first herald was a beefy, slab-jawed tanner in a slouched hat. William Dawes, Jr., barely thirty, still lived in Ann Street, where he had been raised by Puritan stock so strict that children were forbidden to look outside the window on Sundays and the instructive School of Good Manners advised, “Let thy recreations be lawful, brief, and seldom.” Dawes had overcome such constrictions to become an adept smuggler, a patriot messenger, a militia adjutant, and an intelligence agent; while surveilling British officers, he supposedly sometimes posed as a vegetable peddler, sometimes as a miller, sometimes as a drunk. At Warren’s instruction, he would now ride through the Boston Neck gate on a “slow-jogging horse,” then loop northwest through Cambridge, rousing households on the way to Lexington.

The second herald had already proved his value as a trusted courier in nearly a dozen rides to New York, Philadelphia, New Hampshire, and, twice so far this month, Lexington and Concord. Paul Revere had often been mentioned in various newspapers over the past year because of the dispatches he carried hither and yon from Boston; he had, as the historian David Hackett Fischer would write, “a genius for being at the center of great events.” Now forty, with the brown eyes of his French Huguenot forebears, a broad, ruddy face, and the sinewy arms of a metalworker, he had run his own business as a silver- and goldsmith for more than twenty years—making teapots, mending spoons, inventing alloys, and setting false teeth, including two for Dr. Warren. He had become a skilled copperplate engraver, a concocter of allegory and caricature, who also made plates for playing cards, broadside illustrations, and paper money. For all his legendary bravura, Revere’s life was stained with tragedy: he would father sixteen children, his “little lambs,” and most would die before their time.

This was his time. After a brief consultation with Warren, he hurried to his nearby house in Clark’s Square, snatched up his riding boots and a long surtout, then picked his way through the twisting North End alleys to the waterfront. Two confederates waited with a dinghy. Softly they rowed from the wharf, against the young flood and under that old moon, with a temperate breeze stirring out of the southwest. Ahead loomed the Somerset, a seventy-gun warship anchored as a sentinel in the ferryway between Boston and Charlestown, in water so shallow she could barely swing at anchor. Some of Somerset’s crewmen were either manning the longboats at Lechmere Point or working her pumps; an inspection this week had showed the man-of-war to be in desperately poor repair—seams rotten, butt ends open, and long overdue for caulking and sheathing in Halifax. Whether distracted or sightless, the watch failed to spot the small boat that scooted past her stern and on to the Charlestown shore.

In 1775, America had more than three thousand churches, representing eighteen denominations, but none was more important on this April night than Christ Church in Boston’s Salem Street. Known as Old North, the church featured eight great bells cast in England, a magnificent quartet of hand-carved wooden angels perched above the nave, and a towering steeple, long used as a landmark by navigators entering the harbor and featured in a Boston panorama engraved by Revere the previous year. As carefully planned earlier in the week, another confederate—Revere identified him only as “a friend”—climbed 154 stairs and then a rickety ladder to a window in the steeple’s north face, lugging two lanterns of tinned steel with glass panels, pewter finials, and metal rings for hanging or carrying. For plainspun Boston, the lanterns—or at least the one that has survived—were fancy artifacts: fourteen inches high, six inches wide and deep, with two hundred perforations in the top, arranged to throw exquisite shadows shaped as circles, diamonds, and Maltese crosses. Flint and steel soon lighted the candles, and twin gleams could be seen across the harbor. As Revere intended, rebel leaders beyond the Charles now knew that British troops were on the move via Back Bay—two if by sea—rather than taking the more circuitous, one-if-by-land route through Roxbury.

Dramatic as the signal was, and as enduring in American iconography, it proved to be superfluous, since both Dawes and Revere successfully eluded British patrols to spread the word themselves. Handed the reins to a big brown New England mare, Revere swung into the saddle and took off at a canter across Charlestown Neck, hooves striking sparks, rider and steed merged into a single elegant creature, bound for glory.

Two hours later, Revere trotted into Lexington, his mount thoroughly lathered after outgalloping a pair of Gage’s equestrian sentinels near Charlestown. Veering north toward the Mystic River to avoid further trouble, Revere had alerted almost every farmstead and minute captain within shouting distance. Popular lore later credited him with a stirring battle cry—“The British are coming!”—but a witness quoted him as warning, more prosaically, “The regulars are coming out.” Now he carried the alarm to the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s parsonage, just up the road from Lexington Common. Here Clarke had written three thousand sermons in twenty years; here he called up the stairs each morning to rouse his ten children—“Polly, Betsey, Lucy, Liddy, Patty, Sally, Thomas, Jonas, William, Peter, get up!” And here he had given sanctuary, in a bedroom to the left of the front door, to the renegades Hancock and Samuel Adams.

A squad of militiamen stood guard at the house as Revere dismounted, spurs clanking. Two warnings had already come from the east: as many as nine mounted British officers had been seen patrolling the Middlesex roads, perhaps “upon some evil design.” At the door, a suspicious orderly sergeant challenged Revere, and Clarke blocked his path until Hancock reportedly called out, “Come in, Revere, we’re not afraid of you.” The herald delivered his message: British regulars by the hundreds were coming out, first by boat, then on foot. There was not a moment to lose.

Thirty minutes later, Dawes arrived with the same warning, and the two riders soon swung toward Concord. As Adams packed up to move deeper into the countryside, Hancock lumbered about the parsonage with his sword and pistol, prattling on about making a desperate stand until he, too, was persuaded to bolt for safety in his fine carriage.

Now the Lexington bell began to clang in the wooden tower, hard by the meetinghouse. More gallopers rode off to rouse half a hundred villages. Warning gunshots echoed from farm to farm. Bonfires flared. Drums beat. Across the colony, in an image that would endure for centuries, solemn men grabbed their firelocks and stalked off in search of danger, leaving the plow in the furrow, the hoe in the garden, the hammer on the anvil, the bucket at the well sweep. This day would be famous before it dawned.

Lexington spread across ten thousand acres, occupied by 750 people and 400 cows. Hardwood copses separated fields and pastures, and many small creeks snaked toward the distant Charles and Mystic Rivers. Two cleared acres had been given over to the Common, where the eleven-mile road from Charlestown approached straight and level for the final five hundred yards, then forked at the three-story meetinghouse, big and homely as a barn, before continuing to cover the six miles to Concord. On these two acres some 130 militiamen, summoned by that insistent pealing, milled about, stamping their feet against the nighttime chill. They awaited orders from their captain, John Parker, described as “a great tall man … with a high, wide brow.” Now forty-five, a farmer, father of seven, and sometime town assessor, he had fought as a sergeant in the French and Indian War at Louisbourg and Quebec. Shadows falling across the Common deepened the dark sockets around Parker’s eyes, symptomatic of the pulmonary tuberculosis that would kill him five months later.

Massachusetts Bay had been the first colony to form its militia into regiments, one per county in 1636, in an effort to fashion a military organization suitable for more than haphazard local defense. Each generation since had gone to war at least once; an estimated one in four able-bodied Massachusetts men had served in the last French war. Some militia units were little more than armed rabble, saluting unsuspecting officers by firing blank charges at their feet or sneaking up on young women before shooting into the air in a weird courtship ritual. Lexington’s troops, ranging in age from sixteen to sixty-six, were more disciplined; under militia rules, any man interrupting the clerk while he called the roll was fined two shillings. The town had no minute company but had voted money for drums, a carriage to bury the dead, and gunpowder, now stored in the meetinghouse.

A scout dispatched in search of redcoats returned around three a.m. to advise Parker that none could be found. Perhaps this was another false alarm, or a British feint. Rather than keep his men out in the cold to no purpose, the captain dismissed the company with orders to reassemble at the sound of a drum. Some men ambled home. Most headed to the red-doored Buckman Tavern, an ancient “public house of entertainment” with a double hip roof on the edge of the Common. Here they could find a crackling fire and a mug of warm flip, heated at the hearth with a hot iron.

Parker’s scout had not ventured far enough east. The British were coming on hard, spurred by the distant pop of warning shots and the gleam of alarm fires flaring on the horizon. Lieutenant Colonel Smith, the expedition commander, had heeded Gage’s order to lunge for the Concord River bridges with a “party of the best marchers”; six light infantry companies now hurried ahead of the main column. Assured by a passing teamster that a thousand rebels were in arms, Smith also sent a courier to Boston to plead for reinforcements, a wise impulse.

The vanguard making for Concord was led by John Pitcairn. Not only was Major Pitcairn, the marine, now on horseback and far from the sea to which he was accustomed; he was commanding more than two hundred men from a half dozen army regiments to whom he was a stranger. The Scottish son of a Fifeshire minister, portly and affable with heavy brows and full lips, Pitcairn could usually be found in Old North Church on Sundays, although his weekday profanity was described as “a Boston legend.” Now in his mid-fifties, he did not extend his geniality to rebels, who deserved only “severe chastisement.” “If I draw my sword but half out of my scabbard,” he had asserted, “the whole banditti of Massachusetts will run away.” The major, an American clergyman later suggested, was “a good man in a bad cause.”

As an apricot glow began to brighten the eastern sky soon after four a.m., the sounds of a country folk alert and alarmed intensified—bells, shots, distant hoofbeats. Pitcairn ordered his troops to halt and load their weapons, a portentous command. With practiced motions, each soldier plucked a paper cartridge from his waist pouch, bit open the end with his teeth, dribbled some powder grains into the musket flash pan, then poured the rest—close to half an ounce—down the muzzle, followed by the bullet and the cartridge wadding, which were tamped home with a steel ramrod. There was nothing precise about the Brown Bess—that “outspoken, flinty-lipped, brazen-faced jade,” in Rudyard Kipling’s description. Imperfect barrels, imperfect balls, a lack of sights, variable powder, and windage between ball and barrel meant the musket was marginally accurate at fifty yards, hopeless beyond a hundred. But that hardly mattered when bullets were fired in swarms at close range. The enormous lead slug, nearly three-quarters of an inch in diameter and an ounce in heft, could stop a charging bull.

At Pitcairn’s command, the men seated their ramrods and surged forward, breathing hard, pulses pounding. The fourteen-inch bayonets on their muskets protruded above their heads like a picket fence. Scraps of cartridge paper, spat out, littered the road behind them.

The British were less than two miles from Lexington when another scout brought word to Parker of their approach. A drum beat to arms, and that infernal bell tolled again. Men in Buckman Tavern set their tankards next to the guttering candles and scrambled out to the Common. Other men, filling their powder horns in an upper gallery of the meetinghouse that served as the village armory, clattered down the stairs and through the door. But only half the company answered this second call, fewer than eighty men in two ranks, anxiously peering east for redcoats. “Don’t molest them,” Parker said, “without they being first.” Precisely why he chose to confront a superior force from the exposed expanse of the village lawn rather than from a nearby thicket or stone wall would never be clear. Perhaps, dying himself, he had lost all impulse to seek shelter. Certainly he seemed fixed on something larger than this life. When an anxious militiaman said, “There are so few of us. It is folly to stand here,” the captain replied, “The first man who offers to run shall be shot down.”

Full dawn brought the loamy smell of plowed fields and another mild, pleasant morning. The British vanguard swung into view. The tramp of heavy brogans broke the quiet as three companies veered to the right of the meetinghouse at double-quick time. Pitcairn, on his horse, led the rest of the column to the left, following the curve of the Concord road before cantering onto the Common. A guttural roar began to build in the ranks, more growl than cheer. “Soldiers, don’t fire,” Pitcairn yelled, according to a British lieutenant. “Keep your ranks. Form and surround them.” Spectators gawking from the road heard other officers yell, “Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels!” and “Disperse, you rebels, immediately!” When regulars closed to within fifty yards, Parker apparently took the command to heart. As he swore in a deposition a week later, “Upon their sudden approach, I immediately ordered our militia to disperse and not to fire.”

A single gunshot sounded above the clamor, possibly a warning shot or a sniper at Buckman Tavern. Whoever fired first on the Common would remain forever uncertain, but muskets quickly barked along the British line, promiscuous shooting from agitated soldiers in a makeshift command, led by a stranger. “Without any order or regularity,” as Pitcairn later acknowledged, “the light infantry began a scattered fire … contrary to the repeated orders both of me and the officers that were present.” With each trigger pulled, flint in the falling hammer struck a glancing blow against the steel frizzen, sprinkling sparks to ignite powder in the pan, which, in turn, set off the main charge through a touchhole in the side of the breech. Brilliant yellow flame erupted from each muzzle, along with a flat boom, a belch of smoke, and that heavy lead slug moving at a thousand feet per second. Those who outlived the day would remember the acrid smell of burning powder, the rattle of ramrods shoving home another volley, the whiz of balls that missed and the terrible thud of balls hitting home, the shouts, the screams, the puffs of dust from bullets smacking a wall, as if the stone were breathing. Billowing smoke grew so dense that soon only the upper torsos of officers on horseback could be seen clearly. One lieutenant from the 38th Foot lost control of his spooked mount, which bolted six hundred yards through the village until the rider finally reined in.

Few of Parker’s men managed to fire more than once, if that. Nothing was right, except the courage. Militiaman John Munroe, grazed across the cheek and with a scorch mark on his jacket where another bullet had passed between his arm and his waist, fired, retreated a short distance, then loaded his musket with a double charge, which blew off a foot of the barrel. Jonas Parker, a cousin of the captain’s, neatly placed his bullets and spare flints in a hat at his feet. A British ball knocked him to his knees, and as he fumbled to reload, British bayonets tore him dead. Pitcairn slashed at the air with his sword in a futile signal to cease fire. “Our men without any orders rushed in upon them,” Lieutenant Barker of the King’s Own told his diary. “The men were so wild they could hear no orders.”

Only when Colonel Smith cantered into the village with his grenadier companies and ordered a drummer to beat to arms did the carnage end. “I was desirous,” Smith later wrote, “of putting a stop to all further slaughter of those deluded people.” After a final sputter of gunfire, gray smoke drifted off, revealing dying lumps on the greening grass, blood and so much more leaking away.

Lexington had been not a battle, or even a skirmish, but an execution. The only British casualties were two privates, lightly wounded by gunshots, and Pitcairn’s horse, nicked twice in the flank. The American tally was far worse. Eight rebels were dead, nine wounded. Of those slain, only two bodies lay on the original American line. Several had taken bullets in the back while dispersing, including one man captured earlier in the morning and killed while ostensibly trying to escape a hundred yards to the east. Jonathan Harrington was shot close to his house on the western lip of the Common and reportedly died on his doorstep, within view of his wife and son.

Samuel Adams, upon hearing of the gunplay, exclaimed, “Oh, what a glorious morning is this!” But Adams had not been there to see the divine clay smeared on Lexington’s green, along with the litter of hundreds of torn paper cartridges. Reverend Clarke was there, watching from several hundred yards’ distance as Smith, who had prevented his men from pillaging the nearby houses, agreed to allow them a celebratory salute. The redcoats “drew up and formed in a body on the Common,” Clarke reported, “fired a volley and gave three huzzahs by way of triumph.” Then, forming again by companies, they turned and marched west, toward Concord.

Concord was ready for them. Paul Revere had been captured by a British mounted patrol at a bend in the road near Folly Pond, but William Dawes managed to escape at a gallop. Continuing his charmed morning, Revere—saucy and unrepentant, even with a pistol clapped to his head—was soon released, though without his brown mare, to make his way on foot back to the Clarke parsonage. But others had carried warnings into Concord, where a sentinel at the courthouse fired his musket and heaved on the bell rope. The clanging, said to have “the earnestness of speech” and pitched to wake the dead, soon drove all fifteen hundred living souls from their beds.

Reports of shooting in Lexington “spread like electric fire,” by one account, though some insisted that the British would only load powder charges without bullets. Many families fled west or north, or into a secluded copse called Oaky Bottom, clutching the family Bible and a few place settings of silver while peering back to see if their houses were burning. Others buried their treasures in garden plots or lowered them down a well. Boys herded oxen and milk cows into the swamps, flicking at haunches with their switches.

Militiamen, alone or in clusters or in entire companies with fife and drum, rambled toward Concord, carrying pine torches and bullet pouches, their pockets stuffed with rye bread and cheese. They toted muskets, of course—some dating to the French war, or earlier—but also ancient fowling pieces, dirks, rapiers, sabers hammered from farm tools, and powder in cow horns delicately carved with designs or calligraphic inscriptions, an art form that had begun in Concord decades earlier and spread through the colonies. Some wore “long stockings with cowhide shoes,” a witness wrote. “The coats and waistcoats were loose and of huge dimensions, with colors as various as the barks of oak, sumac, and other trees of our hills and swamps could make them.” In Acton, six miles to the northwest, nearly forty minutemen gathered at Captain Isaac Davis’s house, polishing bayonets, replacing gunlock flints, and powdering their hair with flour. Davis, a thirty-year-old gunsmith with a beautiful musket, bade good-bye to his wife and four youngsters with a simple, “Hannah, take good care of the children.”

“It seemed as if men came down from the clouds,” another witness recalled. Some took posts on the two bridges spanning the Concord River, which looped west and north of town. Most made for the village green or Wright Tavern, swapping rumors and awaiting orders from Colonel James Barrett, the militia commander, a sixty-four-year-old miller and veteran of the French war who lived west of town. Dressed in an old coat and a leather apron, Barrett carried a naval cutlass with a plain grip and a straight, heavy blade forged a generation earlier in Birmingham. His men were tailors, shoemakers, smiths, farmers, and keepers from Concord’s nine inns. But the appearance of tidy prosperity was deceiving: Concord was suffering a protracted decline from spent land, declining property values, and an exodus of young people, who had scattered to the frontier in Maine or New Hampshire rather than endure lower living standards than their elders had enjoyed. This economic decay, compounded by the Coercive Acts and British political repression, made these colonial Americans anxious for the future, nostalgic for the past, and, in the moment, angry.

Sometime before eight a.m., perhaps two hundred impatient militiamen headed for Lexington to the rap of drums and the trill of fifes. Twenty minutes later, eight hundred British soldiers hove into view barely a quarter mile away, like a scarlet dragon on the road near the junction known as Meriam’s Corner. “The sun shined on their arms & they made a noble appearance in their red coats,” Thaddeus Blood, a nineteen-year-old minuteman, later testified. “We retreated.”

They fell back in an orderly column, as if leading an enemy parade into Concord, the air vibrant with competing drumbeats. “We marched before them with our drums and fifes going and also the British drums and fifes,” militiaman Amos Barrett recalled. “We had grand music.” Past the meetinghouse the militia marched, past the liberty pole that had been raised as an earnest of their beliefs. A brief argument erupted over whether to make a stand in the village—“If we die, let us die here,” urged the militant minister William Emerson—but most favored better ground on the ridgeline a mile north, across the river. Colonel Barrett agreed, and ordered them to make for North Bridge. Concord was given over to the enemy.

The British brigade wound past Abner Wheeler’s farm, and the farms of the widow Keturah Durant and the spinster seamstress Mary Burbeen and then the widow Olive Stow, who had sold much of her land, along with a horse, cows, swine, and salt pork, to pay her husband’s debts when he’d died, three years earlier. They strode past the farms of Olive’s brother, Farwell Jones, and the widow Rebecca Fletcher, whose husband also had died three years before, and the widower George Minot, a teacher with three motherless daughters, who was not presently at home because he was the captain of a Concord minute company. Into largely deserted Concord the regulars marched, in search of feed for the officers’ horses and water for the parched men. From Burial Ground Hill, Smith and Pitcairn studied their hand-drawn map and scanned the terrain with a spyglass.

Gage’s late intelligence was accurate: in recent weeks, most military stores in Concord had been dispersed to nine other villages or into deeper burrows of mud and manure. Regulars seized sixty barrels of flour found in a gristmill and a malt house, smashing them open and powdering the streets. They tossed five hundred pounds of musket balls into a millpond, knocked the trunnions from several iron cannons found in the jail yard, chopped down the liberty pole, and eventually made a bonfire of gun carriages, spare wheels, tent pegs, and a cache of wooden spoons. The blaze briefly spread to the town hall, until extinguished by a bucket brigade of regulars and villagers.

With the pickings slim in Concord, Colonel Smith ordered more than two hundred men under Captain Lawrence Parsons to march west toward Colonel Barrett’s farm, two miles across the river. Perhaps they would have better hunting there.

Since 1654, a bridge had spanned the Concord River just north of the village. The current structure, sixteen feet wide and a hundred feet long, had been built for less than £65 in 1760 by twenty-six freemen and two slaves, using blasting powder and five teams of oxen. The timber frame featured eight bents to support the gracefully arcing deck, each with three stout piles wedged into the river bottom. Damage from seasonal floods required frequent repairs, and prudent wagon drivers carefully inspected the planks before crossing. A cobbled causeway traversed the marshy ground west of the river.

Seven British companies crossed the bridge around nine that Wednesday morning, stumping past stands of black ash, beech, and blossoming cherry. Dandelions brightened the roadside, and the soldiers’ faces glistened with sweat. Three companies remained to guard the span, while the other four continued with Captain Parsons to the Barrett farm, where they would again be disappointed: “We did not find so much as we expected,” an ensign acknowledged. A few old gun carriages were dragged from the barn, but searchers failed to spot stores hidden under pine boughs in Spruce Gutter or in garden furrows near the farm’s sawmill.

The five Concord militia companies had taken post on Punkatasset Hill, a gentle but insistent slope half a mile north of the bridge. Two Lincoln companies and two more from Bedford joined them, along with Captain Davis’s minute company from Acton, bringing their numbers to perhaps 450, a preponderance evident to the hundred or so redcoats peering up from the causeway; one uneasy British officer estimated the rebel force at fifteen hundred. On order, the Americans loaded their muskets and rambled downhill to within three hundred yards of the enemy. A militia captain admitted feeling “as solemn as if I was going to church.”

Solemnity turned to fury at the sight of black smoke spiraling above the village: the small pyre of confiscated military supplies was mistaken for British arson. Lieutenant Joseph Hosmer, a hog reeve and furniture maker, was described as “the most dangerous man in Concord” because young men would follow wherever he led. Now Hosmer was ready to lead them back across the bridge. “Will you let them burn the town down?” he cried.

Colonel Barrett agreed. They had waited long enough. Captain Davis was ordered to move his Acton minutemen to the head of the column—“I haven’t a man who’s afraid to go,” Davis replied—followed by the two Concord minute companies; their bayonets would help repel any British counterattack. The column surged forward in two files. Some later claimed that fifers tootled “The White Cockade,” a Scottish dance air celebrating the Jacobite uprising of 1745. Others recalled only silence but for footfall and Barrett’s command “not to fire first.” The militia, a British soldier reported, advanced “with the greatest regularity.”

Captain Walter Laurie, commanding the three light infantry companies, ordered his men to scramble back to the east side of the bridge and into “street-firing” positions, a complex formation designed for a constricted field of fire. Confusion followed, as a stranger again commanded strangers. Some redcoats braced themselves near the abutments. Others spilled into an adjacent field or tried to pull up planks from the bridge deck.

Without orders, a British soldier fired into the river. The white splash rose as if from a thrown stone. More shots followed, a spatter of musketry that built into a ragged volley. Much of the British fire flew high—common among nervous or ill-trained troops—but not all. Captain Davis of Acton pitched over dead, blood from a gaping chest wound spattering the men next to him. Private Abner Hosmer also fell dead, killed by a ball that hit below his left eye and blew through the back of his neck. Three others were wounded, including a young fifer and Private Joshua Brooks of Lincoln, grazed in the forehead so cleanly that another private concluded that the British, improbably, were “firing jackknives.” Others knew better. Captain David Brown, who lived with his wife, Abigail, and ten children two hundred yards uphill from the bridge, shouted, “God damn them, they are firing balls! Fire, men, fire!” The cry became an echo, sweeping the ranks: “Fire! For God’s sake, fire!” The crash of muskets rose to a roar.

“A general popping from them ensued,” Captain Laurie later told General Gage. One of his lieutenants had reloaded when a bullet slammed into his chest, spinning him around. Three other lieutenants were wounded in quick succession, making casualties of half the British officers at the bridge and ending Laurie’s fragile control over his detachment. Redcoats began leaking to the rear, and soon all three companies broke toward Concord, abandoning some of their wounded. “We was obliged to give way,” an ensign acknowledged, “then run with the greatest precipitance.” Amos Barrett reported that the British were “running and hobbling about, looking back to see if we was after them.”

Battle smoke draped the river. Three minutes of gunplay had cost five American casualties, including two dead. For the British, eight were wounded and two killed, but another badly hurt soldier, trying to regain his feet, was mortally insulted by minuteman Ammi White, who crushed his skull with a hatchet.

A peculiar quiet descended over what the poet James Russell Lowell would call “that era-parting bridge,” across which the old world passed into the new. Some militiamen began to pursue the fleeing British into Concord, but then veered from the road to shelter behind a stone wall. Most wandered back toward Punkatasset Hill, bearing the corpses of Davis and Abner Hosmer. “After the fire,” a private recalled, “everyone appeared to be his own commander.”

Colonel Smith had started toward the river with grenadier reinforcements, then thought better of it and trooped back into Concord. The four companies previously sent with Captain Parsons to Barrett’s farm now trotted unhindered across the bridge, only to find the dying comrade mutilated by White’s ax, his brains uncapped. The atrocity grew in the retelling: soon enraged British soldiers claimed that he and others had been scalped, their noses and ears sliced off, their eyes gouged out.

As Noah Parkhurst from Lincoln observed moments after the shooting stopped, “Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”

No fifes and drums would play the British back to Boston. From his command post in Wright Tavern, Smith, described by one of his lieutenants as “a very fat heavy man,” moved with unwonted agility in organizing the retreat. Badly wounded privates would be left to rebel mercy, but horse-drawn chaises for injured officers were wheeled out from Concord’s barns and stables. Troops filled their canteens, companies again arranged themselves in march order, and a final round of food and brandy was tossed back. Before noon the red procession headed east, silent and somber, every man aware that eighteen miles of danger lay ahead.

The first mile proved almost tranquil. The road here was wide enough—four rods, or sixty-six feet—for the troops to march eight abreast, in a column stretching three hundred yards or more. Using tactics honed during years of combat in North American woodlands, scores of light infantry flankers swept through the tilled fields and apple orchards, stumbling over frost-heaved rocks while searching for rebel ambushers. “The country was an amazing strong one, full of hills, woods, stone walls, &c.,” Lieutenant Barker of the King’s Own would tell his diary. “They were so concealed there was hardly any seeing them.”

But the rebels were there. Arrowhead Ridge loomed above the north side of the road, offering a sheltered corridor through the Great Fields for hundreds of militiamen hurrying from North Bridge to Meriam’s Corner. Here the road narrowed to a causeway across boggy ground, canalizing and slowing the column. Skirmishers in slouch hats could be seen loping behind outbuildings and across the pastures and meadows. British soldiers wheeled and fired, but again threw their shot high. “This ineffectual fire gave the rebels more confidence,” one officer observed. A return volley killed two redcoats and wounded several more. Some officers dismounted to be less conspicuous; the morning had demonstrated how American marksmen—“with the most unmanly barbarity,” a redcoat complained—already had begun targeting those with shiny gorgets at their necks and the bright vermilion coats commonly worn by the higher ranks.

Now the running gun battle began in earnest, with crackling musketry and spurts of smoke and flame. The provincial ranks swelled to a thousand, twelve hundred, fifteen hundred, more by the hour—“monstrous numerous,” a British soldier would write to his mother. The road—Battle Road, as it would be remembered—angled past Joshua Brooks’s tannery; the smell of tannins rose from the pits, drying racks, and currier shop, and a sharper odor wafted from the nearby slaughterhouse that sluiced offal into Elm Brook. Just to the east, past where the wetlands had been ditched and drained to create a hay meadow, the road began to climb through a cut made in the brow of a wooded hill, then nearly doubled back on itself in a hairpin loop soon known as the Bloody Curve. Here was “a young growth of wood well-filled with Americans,” a minuteman wrote. “The enemy was now completely between two fires.”

Plunging fire gashed the column; grazing fire raked it. Men primed, loaded, and shot as fast as their fumbling hands allowed. A great nimbus of smoke rolled across the crest of the hill. Bullets nickered and pinged, and some hit flesh with the dull thump of a club beating a heavy rug. Militiamen darted from behind stone walls to snatch muskets and cartridge boxes from eight dead redcoats and several wounded who lay writhing in the Bloody Curve. One regular later acknowledged in a letter home that the rebels “fought like bears.” An American private reported seeing a wounded grenadier stabbed repeatedly by passing militiamen so that “blood was flowing from many holes in his waistcoat.” He later reflected, “Our men seemed maddened with the sight of British blood, and infuriated to wreak vengeance on the wounded and helpless.”

More vengeance lurked a mile and a half ahead. Captain John Parker’s company had suffered seventeen casualties in Lexington eight hours earlier, but Parker and his men—perhaps a hundred or more—were keen to fight again. Two miles west of the Common, they dispersed above a granite outcrop in a five-acre woodlot thick with hardwood—hickory, beech, chestnut, red and white oak—and huckleberry bushes. Battle noise drifted from the west, and around two p.m. the thin red line came into view six hundred yards down Battle Road, moving briskly despite more than sixty wounded, not to mention the two dozen dead already left behind. A small bridge at a sharp bend in the road again constricted the column, and as the British vanguard approached within forty yards, the rebels fired. Bullets struck Colonel Smith in the thigh and Captain Parsons in the arm. Major Pitcairn galloped forward to take command as redcoats sprayed the woodlot with lead slugs. When enemy soldiers began to bound up both flanks, Parker and his men turned and scampered through the trees, drifting toward Lexington to join other lurking ambuscades.

The “plaguey fire,” as one British captain called it, now threatened the column with annihilation. “I had my hat shot off my head three times,” a soldier later reported. “Two balls went through my coat, and carried away my bayonet from my side.” Gunfire seemed to swarm from all compass points at Bloody Bluff and, five hundred yards farther on, at Fiske Hill. Pitcairn’s horse threw him to the ground, then cleared a wall and fled into the rebel lines. The major wrapped up his injured arm and pressed on. Ensign Jeremy Lister was shot through the right elbow; a surgeon’s mate extracted the ball from under his skin, but a half dozen bone fragments would later be removed, some the size of hazelnuts.

The combat grew even more ferocious and intimate at Ebenezer Fiske’s house, still thirteen miles from Boston Harbor. James Hayward, a twenty-five-year-old teacher, had left his father’s farm in Acton that morning with a pound of powder and forty balls. At Fiske’s well, he abruptly encountered a British soldier. Both fired. The redcoat died on the spot; Hayward would linger for eight hours before passing, shards of powder horn driven into his hip by the enemy bullet. Several wounded British soldiers were left by their comrades in the Fiske parlor, and there they died.

“Our ammunition began to fail, and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarce able to act,” Ensign Henry De Berniere later wrote. “We began to run rather than retreat.” Officers tried to force the men back into formation, but “the confusion increased rather than lessened.” Hands and faces were smeared black from the greasy powder residue on ramrods; tiny powder burns from firelock touchholes flecked collars. The ragged procession entered Lexington, with the blood-streaked Common on the left. Officers again strode to the front of the column, brandished their weapons, and “told the men if they advanced they should die,” De Berniere added.

And then, like a crimson apparition, more than a thousand redcoats appeared on rising ground half a mile east of the village: three infantry regiments of the 1st Brigade and a marine battalion, sent from Boston as reinforcements. Smith’s beleaguered men gave a hoarse shout and pelted forward into the new British line, “their tongues hanging out of their mouths, like those of dogs after a chase,” as a later account described them. Wounded men collapsed under the elm trees or crowded into Munroe Tavern, sprawling across the second-floor dance hall or in bunks normally rented by passing drovers. To the delight of those rescued, and the dismay of the insurgents close on their heels, two Royal Artillery guns began to boom near the tavern, shearing tree limbs around the Common and punching a hole in Reverend Clarke’s meetinghouse. Gunners in white breeches with black spatterdashes swabbed each bore with a sponge, then rammed home another propellant charge and 6-pound ball. Sputtering portfire touched the firing vents and the guns boomed again with great belches of white smoke. Cast-iron shot skipped across the ground a thousand yards or so downrange, then skipped again with enough terrifying velocity to send every militiaman—under British artillery fire for the first time ever—diving for cover.

Overseeing this spectacle from atop his white charger, splendidly uniformed in scarlet, royal blue, and gold trim, Brigadier Hugh Earl Percy could only feel pleased with his brigade and with himself. “I had the happiness,” he would write his father, the Duke of Northumberland, on the following day, “of saving them from inevitable destruction.” Heir to one of the empire’s greatest fortunes and a former aide-de-camp to George III, Lord Percy at thirty-two was spindly and handsome, with high cheekbones, alert eyes, and a nose like a harpoon blade. As a member of Parliament, he at times had opposed the government’s policies, including the coercive measures against Massachusetts. As a professional soldier, he was capable, popular—the £700 spent from his own pocket to transport his soldiers’ families to Boston helped—and a diligent student of war, sometimes citing Frederick the Great, whose maxim on artillery was proved here in Lexington: “Cannon lends dignity to what might otherwise be a vulgar brawl.”

A year in New England had expunged whatever theoretical affection Percy held for the colonists, whom he now considered “extremely violent & wrong-headed,” if not “the most designing, artful villains in the world.” To a friend in England he wrote, “This is the most beautiful country I ever saw in my life, & if the people were only like it, we should do very well.… I cannot but despise them completely.” Now he was killing them.

Two blunders early in the day had already marred the rescue mission. Gage’s letter directing the 1st Brigade to muster at four a.m. on the Common was carelessly mislaid for several hours. Then the marines failed to get word—the order was addressed to Major Pitcairn, who had long departed Boston—causing further delays. At nine a.m., five hours late, Percy’s column had surged across Boston Neck. “Not a smiling face was among them,” a clergyman reported. “Their countenances were sad.” To lift spirits, fifers played a ditty first heard in a Philadelphia comic opera in 1767, with lyrics since improvised by British soldiers:

Yankee Doodle came to town

For to buy a firelock;

We will tar and feather him

And so we will John Hancock.

Not until one p.m., after passing the village of Menotomy, five miles from Lexington, did Percy first get word that Smith’s beleaguered expedition was retreating in mortal peril. By that time, a third mishap was playing out behind him. Desperate to make speed from Boston, Percy had declined to take a heavy wagon loaded with 140 extra artillery rounds; until reprovisioned, his gunners would make do with the twenty-four rounds carried for each 6-pounder in their side boxes, just as each infantryman would make do with his thirty-six musket cartridges. Two supply wagons had eventually followed the column only to be ambushed by a dozen “exempts”—men too old for militia duty—at an old cider mill across from the Menotomy meetinghouse. Two soldiers and four horses were killed, and several other redcoats were captured after reportedly tossing their muskets into Spy Pond. Rebels dragged the carcasses into a field, hid the wagons in a hollow, and swept dust over bloodstains on the road.

At three-fifteen p.m., Percy ordered his troops, now eighteen hundred strong, back to Boston. The Royal Welch Fusiliers formed a rear guard, and Smith’s exhausted men tucked in among their fresher comrades. The wounded hobbled as best they could or rode on gun barrels or the side boxes, spilling off whenever gunners unlimbered to hurl more iron shot. Percy was unaware that his supply train had been bushwhacked and that rebel numbers were approaching four thousand as companies from the outer counties arrived. Despite those dignified cannons, he was in for a vulgar brawl.

Looting began even before the column cleared Lexington. In light infantry slang, “lob” meant plunder taken without opposition; “grab” was booty taken by force. “There never was a more expert set than the light infantry at either grab, lob, or gutting a house,” a British officer later acknowledged. Lieutenant Barker complained in his diary that soldiers on the return march “were so wild and irregular that there was no keeping ’em in any order.… The plundering was shameful.” Sheets snatched from beds served as peddler’s packs to carry beaver hats, spinning wheels, mirrors, goatskin breeches, an eight-day clock, delftware, earrings, a Bible with silver clasps, a dung fork. “Many houses were plundered,” Lieutenant Mackenzie wrote. “I have no doubt this enflamed the rebels.… Some soldiers who stayed too long in the houses were killed in the very act of plundering.”

Every mile brought heavier fire. “We were attacked on all sides,” wrote Captain Glanville Evelyn, whose King’s Own company accompanied Percy, “from woods and orchards and stone walls, and from every house on the road.… They are the most absolute cowards on the face of the earth.” The day’s bloodiest fighting erupted in Menotomy—street to street, house to house, room to room. Here twenty-five Americans and forty British would die, with scores more wounded. “All that were found in the houses,” Lieutenant Barker wrote, “were put to death.”

Over a hundred British bullets perforated Cooper’s Tavern while the innkeeper and his wife cowered in the cellar. Two unarmed patrons were killed upstairs, according to a deposition, “their brains dashed across the floor and walls.” At the Jason Russell house, Danvers militiamen piled up shingles as a breastwork in the yard only to be outflanked and caught in a British cross fire. Some fled into the house as balls poured through the windows, “making havoc of glass.” Russell was shot on his doorstep and bayoneted nearly a dozen times; Timothy Munroe ran for his life and escaped, despite a bullet in the leg and buttons on his waistcoat shot away. Eight militiamen who barricaded themselves in the cellar survived after shooting a regular who ventured down the stairs, but others upstairs were killed, perhaps executed. A dozen bodies later were laid side by side in the south room, their blood soaking the plank floor.

“We retired for 15 miles under an incessant fire, which like a moving circle, surrounded and followed us wherever we went,” Percy would write the following day. “It was impossible not to lose a good many men.” He would have lost a good many more had he not made the best British tactical decision of the day. As his vanguard approached Cambridge around five p.m., Percy studied two paper sheets pinned together as a sketch map of the road ahead. Rather than returning via the only bridge over the Charles River to reach Roxbury and Boston Neck, he ordered the column to pivot left into Kent’s Lane and head for Charlestown. The route would require ferrying his men into Boston, but Somerset and other warships would offer protection. As he suspected and later confirmed, a large rebel force had tossed the bridge planks into the Charles and militiamen waited in ambush behind barricades. Had the column not veered away, a senior British general later concluded, “there would have been an end that day of British government in America.”

The final miles to Charlestown were harrowing enough—casualties climbing, ammunition dwindling, sun sinking, men at the last pitch of exhaustion. The column avoided an ambush at Harvard Square, but several soldiers died in another gunfight near the future Beech and Elm Streets while three rebels who had built a redoubt at Watson’s Corner were encircled and bayoneted. William Marcy, described as “a simple-minded youth” who thought he was watching a parade, was shot dead while sitting on a wall, cheering. Percy’s white charger was also hit; he found another, nonplussed to see American gunmen who, he wrote, “advanced within ten yards to fire at me & other officers.” Ensign Jeremy Lister, slumped on a horse and faint with blood loss from his shattered elbow, “found the balls whistled so smartly about my ears I thought it more prudent to dismount.” It was said that footsore soldiers flung themselves onto low ground near the Charles and “drank like dogs from an old pond.” Now everyone’s tongue was hanging out. “Taking the whole together,” a militiaman wrote, “it was the most fatiguing day’s work I ever heard of.”

Of Cambridge’s eight hundred residents, many hid a mile west at Fresh Pond. Hannah Winthrop, the wife of a Harvard mathematics professor, wrote that a remote house there was “filled with women whose husbands had gone forth to meet the assailants, seventy or eighty of these, with numbers of infant children, weeping and agonizing for the fate of their husbands.” In Charlestown, the chatter of musketry and an occasional cannon boom carried from Milk Road on the approach to Charlestown Neck.

Dusk brightened each muzzle flash, and scarlet bursts limned the line of retreat. Some Charlestown residents fled across the Mystic River at Penny Ferry or scurried along the marshes toward Medford. Others hid in clay quarries below the high pasture that would soon be known as Breed’s Hill. Terrified women and children huddled in the local Pest House, usually reserved for the infectious. Returning British officers crowded a tavern near the town hall. “All was tumult and confusion,” a witness reported, “nothing but drink called for everywhere.” Edward Barber, the fourteen-year-old son of a sea captain, was shot dead while watching the column from his front window. Rumors spread quickly that the British were massacring children.

The shooting ebbed and finally faded away, along with this very long day. Percy ordered the grenadiers and light infantry to the Charlestown wharves, where boat crews waited to row them the half mile to Boston. Five hundred fresh regulars arrived to garrison the heights below Charlestown Neck, including Bunker Hill. Militiamen scraped beds from the hillsides north of the Neck or stumbled back into Cambridge to sleep on their arms. “The civil war was begun at Concord this morning,” a parson told his diary. “Lord direct all things for His glory.” A Roxbury physician said simply, “Well, the nail is driven.”

The great spire atop Old North loomed above the river. Keening carried from the homes of the dead. The moon rose, a bit later than the previous night, and found the world changed, changed utterly.

A thousand campfires glittered from the high ground in a semicircle around Boston, tracing the contours of the siege that would last for almost a year. Rebel sentinels posted the Neck at Roxbury, and patrols scuffed through the night. “We had as much liquor as we wanted,” Private Samuel Haws wrote in his journal, “and every man drawed three biscuit which were taken from the Regulars the day before, which were hard enough for flints.” British ships remained cleared for action, with guard boats doubled and the Charlestown ferry lane closed but for the steady shuttling of soldiers back to their barracks. In a tense conference with General Gage late Wednesday night, the Royal Navy urged “burning and laying waste the whole country” before insurgents could attack the garrison. Gage rejected the proposal as “too rash and sanguinary,” and soon pulled his exposed troops from the Charlestown peninsula. British rule in New England now ended at Boston’s town limits.

The countryside hardly slept. Horses, cattle, pigs, and men lay dead across a twenty-mile corridor from the Charles to the Concord River. A rumor that redcoats were on the march northeast of Boston sent civilians fleeing into the woods, the village streets behind them strewn with bedding and cookware that had tumbled from farm carts. “Men and horses driving post up and down the roads,” a deacon in Brighton noted in his diary. “People were in great perplexity.” More family silver was lowered down wells or tucked into tree hollows. Horses were saddled and unsaddled, oxen yoked and unyoked. Some farmers armed themselves with pikes, whittled sharp and fire-hardened.

Women in Framingham clutched axes and pitchforks, convinced that black servants incited by the British were intent on murder. A similar report in Menotomy prompted a woman to ask her approaching slave, “Are you going to kill us, Ishmael?” The Anglican church in Cambridge became a field hospital, and wounded men jammed private homes. Nathaniel Cleaves of Beverly would receive a three-shilling bill from a surgeon for “amputating finger, sutures, &c.,” and Israel Everett was also charged three shillings, for “extracting a bullet from the cubitus,” the forearm. Samuel Whittemore, said to be eighty-one when he fought with musket, pistols, and sword behind a stone wall west of Cambridge, was treated for bayonet wounds and a gunshot that carried away part of his cheek; he would live to see his great-great-grandchildren, according to the obituary published when he died at ninety-eight in 1793. Young John Tolman, shot between the shoulder blades and left for dead, also recovered to write, in his old age, “Freedom or independence was the hobby I mounted, sword in hand, neck or nothing, life or death.”

In Boston, surgeons toiled in the barracks and wherever wounded regulars had collapsed, snipping off bloody uniforms, lopping away ruined arms and legs, dosing their patients with Jesuit’s bark in an effort, often vain, to prevent mortification. Officer casualty rolls listed the wounds with anatomical simplicity: “thigh,” “breast,” “throat.” One British doctor complained in a letter home that American balls were deliberately scored to shatter on impact and inflict greater damage. Perhaps, but more typically hand-cast bullets often had a ridged seam that left hideous, ragged wounds. The butcher’s bill was grim indeed. British casualties totaled 273, nearly 15 percent of the total force that marched into Middlesex on April 19; of those, 73 men were killed or would die of their wounds. American casualties numbered 95, over half of them—49—dead.

Collecting bodies began promptly. A Dedham militia company was ordered to search the battlefield and to bury the unburied. Reverend David McClure rode from Roxbury toward Lexington in the drizzle that fell on Thursday, April 20. “I saw several dead bodies, principally British, on & near the road,” he wrote. “They were all naked, having been stripped.… They lay on their faces.” As a gesture to British widows and orphans she would never know but could not ignore, Mary Hartwell of Lincoln took her children by the hand and followed an ox-cart hearse to a large trench in the town burial ground where the dead regulars were interred. “There was one in a brilliant uniform, whom I supposed to have been an officer,” she recalled. “His hair was tied up in a queue.”

The fourteen-year-old son of John Hicks found his father’s body on the roadside near the Watson’s Corner barricade; the boy took him home in a wagon. The corpse of Isaac Davis, killed in the first volley at North Bridge, was laid out in his bedroom before interment with some of his other comrades from Acton. “His countenance was pleasant, and seemed little altered,” his widow, Hannah, would recall in 1835 when she was eighty-nine. Davis’s epitaph deemed him “a loving husband, a tender father, a kind neighbor, an ingenious craftsman, and serviceable to mankind.”

In Danvers, a young girl noted that the seven dead men stacked on a cart all wore gray homespun stockings; two minute companies with reversed arms and muffled drums escorted them to their common grave. A dozen corpses in Menotomy were hauled to a burial trench on an ox-drawn sled, legs and arms splayed and rubbery; they were buried, a witness reported, “head to point, with their clothes on just as they fell.” The eight dead from Lexington were laid in rude coffins, described as “four large boards nailed up.” Villagers dug a trench close to the tree line in the cemetery. “I saw them let down into the ground,” a daughter of Reverend Clarke recalled. “It was a little rainy, but we waited to see them covered up with clods.” Using pine and oak boughs, the parson himself helped hide the raw gash in case the British should return in a mood of desecration.

The British would never return, not here. The first of the war’s thirteen hundred actions had been fought, the first battle deaths mourned. Fifty-eight towns and villages, from Acton to Woburn, had sent men into the fight; fourteen thousand had marched against the regulars, of whom about four thousand actually heaved themselves at the British column. For all the chaos of the day, the Americans had demonstrated impressive organizational skills, although combat leadership above the grade of captain had been erratic and sometimes nonexistent. Each militia company had essentially fought alone, improvising without tactical orchestration from higher command. A Massachusetts general—the tubby, sensible William Heath of Roxbury—had trundled out to Menotomy on Wednesday afternoon, perhaps inspiriting young musketmen but hardly imposing his will on what was the first battle he had ever seen. On Thursday he would be supplanted by Major General Artemas Ward, who shrugged off an excruciating attack of kidney stones to ride forty miles from his Shrewsbury farm to Cambridge.

The limits of the musket even in close combat were clear enough after the daylong battle. Later scholars calculated that at least seventy-five thousand American rounds had been fired, using well over a ton of powder, but only one bullet in almost three hundred had hit home. The shot heard round the world likely missed. Fewer than one militiaman in every ten who engaged the column drew British blood, despite the broad target of massed redcoats. A combat bromide held that it took a man’s weight in bullets to kill him, and on Battle Road that equation was not far exaggerated.

Still, British survivors emerged from the maelstrom with a new respect for American fighters. “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself very much mistaken,” Percy wrote General Harvey, the adjutant general in London, a few hours after returning to Boston. “They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about.” Lieutenant Mackenzie acknowledged his foe’s “violent and determined spirit.”

The British combat performance, if often courageous in the ranks, had been troubling, with miserable staff work and inert commanders, Percy excepted. The day’s action included looting, arson, and various atrocities, suggesting that the usual decorum of eighteenth-century warfare would be adapted to an American setting. On April 21, Gage publicly rebuked his men for “great inattention and neglect to the commands of their officers”; he demanded that they “behave with more discipline and in a more soldierlike manner.” General Harvey, upon reading accounts of April 19, later wrote, “I am much concerned at the wild behavior of the men.” To Percy he added, “It was an unlucky day.”

Like a burning fuse, accounts of that day raced across New England and down the seaboard, carried in some instances by Paul Revere for a four-shilling per diem plus “expenses for self and horse.” “To arms!” criers cried. “Gage has fired upon the people!” A rider appeared on a Providence wharf where deckhands were unloading salt. “War, war, boys,” he called. “There is war.” Newspapers printed stories of variable accuracy, beginning with a twenty-six-line account in the loyalist Boston News-Letter on April 20, deploring “this shocking introduction to all the miseries of a civil war.” The New-Hampshire Gazette’s headline read, “Bloody News.”

In barely three weeks, the first reports of the day’s action would reach Charleston and Savannah. Lurid rumors spread quickly: of grandfathers shot in their beds, of families burned alive, of pregnant women bayoneted. Americans in thirteen colonies were alarmed, aroused, angry. “The times are very affecting,” Reverend Ezra Stiles told his diary in Rhode Island on April 23. Freeholders in Hackensack authorized payment of a shilling and sixpence to a local gunsmith for each musket cleaned. Eight thousand citizens rallied for a town meeting in Philadelphia, where an observer noted that “the rage militaire, as the French call a passion for arms, has taken possession of the whole continent.” A New Yorker wrote a friend in London, “There is no such thing as being a looker on.” Militia companies in Pennsylvania rushed to order drums and colors; soon men in uniform, said to be “as thick as bees,” were exercising twice daily under arms, including many “Broadbrims,” as John Adams called the pacifist Quakers.

Meeting in Concord on April 22, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appointed a committee to take sworn statements from nearly a hundred eyewitnesses, to be published promptly in colonial newspapers. Joseph Warren appended a cover letter to these accounts, lamenting that “we are at last plunged into the horrors of a most unnatural war.” The myth of violated innocence meant that the rebel stockpiling of war supplies in recent months must remain obscure, along with details about the colony’s deft, robust call to arms. A narrative congealed, and with it a brilliant propaganda stratagem: Gage was the aggressor; redcoats fired first; helpless civilians had been slaughtered.

A swift American schooner, the Quero, sailed from Salem for England on April 29 carrying recent copies of the Essex Gazette, with an article that began, “Last Wednesday, the 19th of April, the Troops of his Britannick Majesty commenced Hostilities upon the People of this Province.” The cargo also included eyewitness depositions and a corroborative statement from a captured British officer. Warren admonished the skipper, Captain John Derby, to keep the voyage “a profound secret from every person on earth.” After an unmolested crossing in just twenty-nine days, Derby delivered his packet in London, where the accounts appeared in the three-penny Evening Post to be read by, among others, George III and Lord North.

The king’s resolve was unshaken. He still believed that “with firmness and perseverance America will be brought to submission.” Others in England were less sanguine. The government was unable to offer a coherent rejoinder to the American claims except to plead for “a suspension of belief.” “This looks serious,” Edward Gibbon wrote, “and is indeed so.”

The news of Concord “flew like wildfire and threw the whole Continent into a flame,” Horace Walpole told his journal. “Bitter invectives were published every day against the governing party.” The guard at St. James’s Palace reportedly was doubled. Even staunch supporters of North’s regime felt bewildered. “All my prejudices are against the Americans,” the theologian John Wesley wrote Lord Dartmouth, but “waiving all considerations of right and wrong, I ask is it common sense to use force toward the Americans?” Gage’s laconic, tardy version of events, sent aboard the sluggish brig Sukey, did not arrive in England until June 9; the commander in chief’s dispatch, only four paragraphs long, hardly reassured his monarch, his government, or his fellow Englishmen, particularly since he closed by noting, “Several thousand are now assembled about this town, threatening an attack and getting up artillery, and we are very busy making preparations to oppose them.”

Preparations also continued in the American camp. Citizens in Concord retrieved cannons and musket balls from millponds, thickets, and various hiding places. A seven-year-old in Braintree named John Quincy Adams later recalled how militiamen “took the pewter spoons out of our kitchen to melt them into bullets.” Men in Menotomy pried the shoes from the four horses killed while pulling Percy’s ill-fated supply wagons. A scavenged red coat was draped across a brace of sticks in a greening field as both a scarecrow and a warning. On the Sunday following the battle, and for many Sundays to come, preachers drew from Lamentations to remind parishioners that their suffering reflected divine judgment on their own imperfections: “The joy of our heart is ceased. Our dance is turned into mourning.”

Yet many also felt vibrant, even exhilarated, and aware that “something clear and fine” had transpired, as the historian Allen French would write a century and a half later. They were now swept up in events grander than themselves, in “the meeting of strong men, at the beginning of great things.”

True enough. But something opaque and awful also had happened, a fraternal bloodletting. The enmity of recent years had curdled into hatred. Young men had died in agony, as befell young men in war, and many, many more were still to die. One of them was Lieutenant Edward Hull of the 43rd Foot. Shot at North Bridge, then shot again in a chaise ambulance during the retreat through Menotomy, Hull had been left behind in rebel care. A day after the battle, Reverend McClure found the young Scot in obvious anguish from three bullet wounds, yet still “of a youthful, fair, and delicate countenance.” Sprawled across a feather bed in Samuel and Elizabeth Butterfield’s house near Cooper’s Tavern, he wore a greatcoat and fur hat provided by his captors, since his own men had stripped him of his tunic, waistcoat, and shirt before the militia snatched his shoes and buckles. His bloody breeches lay beside him on the bed, and he sucked on an orange donated by a neighbor. “I asked him if he was dangerously wounded,” McClure wrote. “He replied, ‘Yes, mortally.’” Lieutenant Hull would linger for nearly two weeks in a twilight of pain and remorse; then, on May 2, he “took heaven by the way,” as the expression went. Six rebel officers escorted his coffin to the Charlestown ferryway, where British bargemen rowed him to Boston for burial.

He, at least, would be drummed into the next world. The graves of many others remained unmarked and unremembered, except for the long bones and the ribs and the skulls that over the years pushed to the surface in Middlesex meadows and woodlands, memento mori from one raving afternoon on Battle Road.

3.
I Wish This Cursed Place Was Burned

BOSTON AND CHARLESTOWN, MAY–JUNE 1775

An army of sorts soon bivouacked along a ten-mile crescent from Roxbury to Chelsea, determined to serve the god of battle by driving the British into the sea. In late April, the provincial congress called for thirty thousand American troops to turn out, and legions left farm, shop, and hearth, including one patriot and his three sons who hurried from their sawmill without even bothering to shut the gate. Two thousand were said to march from New Hampshire. Forty-six of Connecticut’s seventy-two towns sent men, and classes at Yale College were canceled for lack of students. “The ardor of our people is such that they can’t be kept back,” a committee in New Haven informed John Hancock. A woman in Philadelphia wrote, “My only brother I have sent to the camp.… Had I twenty sons and brothers, they should go.”

The Essex Gazette would name this host the Grand American Army, though William Tudor, a protégé of John Adams’s who soon would serve as judge advocate, called it “little better than an armed mob.” Houses abandoned by loyalist families in Cambridge were confiscated for barracks and officers’ billets. Eleven hundred tents accumulated by the Committee of Supply sprouted along the Charles, and a request went out to sailmakers and ship masters for more. “We have stripped the seaports of canvas to make tents,” a member of the provincial congress reported. Any man who enlisted fifty-nine others into a company qualified for a captaincy; any captain who organized ten companies might be designated a regimental colonel.

Drums beat reveille daily at four a.m., and after roll call the men marched to morning prayers. “The camp abounds with clergymen,” one soldier wrote, and more than a dozen local divines volunteered their services for regiments without chaplains. Officers were empowered to suppress “tumults” in the ranks, to confine men to their tents after evening tattoo, and to shutter grogshops selling liquor to the troops. The smells of encampment grew ripe—wood smoke, roasting meat, imperfectly dug latrines. Soldiers cast new bullets with molding tools, fashioning cartridges from paper scraps and thimbles of powder. A homesick soldier hanged himself in a barn. “I went down & saw him,” a private noted in his journal, then added, “I went home & took a nap.” More rumors flew, including a pastor’s warning in early May to beware “lest General Gage should spread the smallpox in your army.”

No sooner did the Grand American Army muster than it began to melt away. Farmers left to tend their spring fields, shopkeepers to tend their counters. Most Connecticut troops soon wandered home, discouraged by the shortage of provisions around Boston. The force would dwindle to sixteen thousand or so within a month after the shots at Lexington, although no one was sure of the number. “As to the army, it is in such a shifting, fluctuating state,” a Committee of Safety member wrote. “They are continually going and coming.” To deceive the British in mid-May, a brigade of seven hundred men in Roxbury marched round and round a hill to feign preponderance; a mile-long column of more than two thousand marched from Cambridge to the Charlestown fish market, bared their fangs across the Charles, then marched back.

Shortages extended beyond canvas and rations. “We are in want of almost everything, but of nothing so much as arms and ammunition,” Joseph Warren wrote on May 15 to Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress had just convened. Massachusetts counted thirty-eight cannons, mostly inferior iron guns. Rhode Island sent a few brass fieldpieces to the siege line, but they hardly sufficed to confront the British Empire. In mid-month, welcome news arrived from Lake Champlain in New York, more than two hundred miles northwest: at three-thirty a.m. on May 10, eighty-five whooping New England roughnecks, later described as “tatterdemalions in linsey-woolsey who call themselves Green Mountain Boys,” had swarmed from a scow-rigged bateau to overrun the British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga.

Almost fifty sleepy redcoats had surrendered without a fight, as had a smaller detachment at nearby Crown Point. The captured booty included some two hundred iron cannons, ten tons of musket balls, thirty thousand flints, and forty-nine gallons of rum, much of it consumed by those tatterdemalions to celebrate their victory. Two men led the raid in an unsteady collaboration: a strapping, profane, sometime farmer, lead miner, and tosspot philosopher named Ethan Allen and a short, gifted Connecticut apothecary, merchant prince, and hothead named Benedict Arnold, who had been given a colonel’s commission by Joseph Warren and whose long nose and dark hair caused him to resemble a raven in human form. How the captured munitions would be transported from the remote fortress remained to be seen, but no one who knew Allen and Arnold, or knew of them, doubted that both would be heard from again. For now, the “acts of burglarious enterprise,” in one British writer’s description, gave the Americans control not only of Ticonderoga—the most strategic inland position on the continent—but also of the long blue teardrop of Lake Champlain, the traditional invasion route into, or out of, Canada.

Life in besieged Boston grew grimmer by the day. Soon after the fighting began, General Gage agreed to issue exit permits to those who wanted to leave town if all citizens surrendered their weapons at Faneuil Hall. By late April, some 1,778 firelocks had been handed over, plus 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 ancient blunderbusses. Gage insisted that swords also be added to the pile. “Nearly half the inhabitants have left the town already,” the merchant John Andrews wrote a friend on May 6. “You see parents that are lucky enough to procure papers, with bundles in one hand and a string of children in the other, wandering out of town … not knowing where they’ll go.” Provisions grew short, prices soared, fresh food vanished. “Pork and beans one day,” Andrews wrote, “and beans and pork another.”

Loyalists from the countryside slipped into Boston for Crown protection, then complained bitterly to Gage that allowing all rebel sympathizers to leave would invite bombardment of the town; hostages must be kept to discourage attack. Gage saw the point, and the exodus largely stopped except for those able to sneak out by boat. “It is inconceivable the distress and ruin this unnatural dispute has caused to this town and its inhabitants,” the surveyor Henry Pelham wrote on May 16. “Almost every shop and store is shut. No business of any kind is going on.” A British lieutenant observed after taking a stroll, “I can’t help looking on it as a ruined town. I think I see the grass growing in every street.” More grass was needed: provender for British horses by late May was short by three thousand tons. Warming weather and a diet of salt meat brought widespread illness. Reverend Henry Caner, a loyalist, would write to London, “It is not uncommon to bury 20 to 30 a week among the troops and inhabitants.… If our lives must pay for our loyalty, God’s will be done.” Another loyalist clergyman, Reverend John Wiswall, who took refuge with his family in Boston from Cape Cod, noted in his journal, “My daughter died the 23rd and my wife the 26th. Buried in family tomb the 28th.”

From his Province House headquarters, Gage awaited reinforcements and braced against a rebel assault. Regiments built several small batteries on the Common and a larger redoubt on Beacon Hill. Gunners at Boston Neck were ordered to keep lighted matches by their cannons at all times. Regulars patrolled the wharves every half hour. Loyalist volunteers with white cockades in their hats kept vigil in the streets at night. “We are threatened with great multitudes,” Gage wrote Lord Dartmouth in mid-May. “The people called friends of government are few.” News from the other provinces was bleak. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire were “in open rebellion,” he told London. “They are arming at New York and, as we are told, in Philadelphia and all the southern provinces.” The royal mail was no longer secure; a postal rider with official correspondence from New York had been detained, his locked bag jimmied open with hammer and pliers.

Guard boat crews patrolled the harbor with 6-pounders, alert for fire rafts and often ducking sniper rounds from the far shore. Ships from England no sooner dropped anchor than potshots rang out. “The country is all in arms, and we are absolutely invested with many thousand men, some of them so daring as to come very near our outposts,” Captain Glanville Evelyn wrote his father in Scotland. Morale sank in the regular ranks. A Royal Navy surgeon permitted to treat wounded British captives in Cambridge wrote in May that the rebel army “is truly nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness.” A new British drinking song warned:

Boston we shall in ashes lay,

It is a nest of knaves,

We’ll make them soon for mercy pray,

Or send them to their graves.

There would be ashes on May 17. That night, a sergeant in the 65th Regiment reportedly delivered musket cartridges by candlelight to the barracks on Treat’s Wharf; soon after his arrival, a small, accidental blaze grew into a conflagration that burned until three a.m. Gage had placed the town’s fire engines under military control, and inept redcoats, one merchant complained, operated the apparatus “with such stupidity that the flames raged with incredible fury & destroyed 30 stores.” The losses at Dock Square also included regimental uniforms, weapons, and donations collected for Boston’s poor.

Fresh meat for British larders and forage for British horses could be found within a mile or two of Province House, but trouble could be found there as well. In Boston Harbor, more than thirty islands—used for over a century as livestock pastures and hay fields—stippled the narrow, twisting approaches from open water. Shoals, mudflats, salt creeks, and sandbars changed shape with each new tide. Much of the harbor at low water was no deeper than three fathoms—eighteen feet—while the three largest Royal Navy ships on station drew twenty feet or more. American mariners skittered through this watery terrain in smacks, canoes, and whaleboats, trading shots at long range with British foraging parties. On May 21, Gage sent several sloops to Grape Island, but they scavenged only eight tons of hay before rebels burned eighty more.

On Saturday morning, May 27, six hundred Massachusetts and New Hampshire militiamen scuffed from the Chelsea meetinghouse down Beach Road to the shoreline. By eleven a.m., the ebbing tide had fallen enough to let them slosh knee-deep across narrow Belle Isle Creek to Hog Island, where, as ordered by the Committee of Safety, they rounded up 411 sheep, 27 cows, and 6 horses, shooting those that would not be herded. The British were to get none. Thirty men waded across Crooked Creek to adjacent Noddle’s Island, at the confluence of the Charles and Mystic Rivers. At seven hundred acres, Noddle’s was the largest of the harbor isles, once a refuge for Baptist apostates driven from Boston by Puritans, and long a favorite dueling ground for aggrieved parties of all denominations. Here the rebels set fire to a barn piled high with salt hay.

Aboard the fifty-gun Preston in the Boston anchorage, the sight of thick smoke to the east caught the squinting eye of Samuel Graves, commander of the North American station. Graves this very week had received news from London of his promotion to vice admiral of the white; he celebrated with a thirteen-gun salute from his squadron and colors appropriate to his new rank hoisted above Preston’s deck. A sixty-two-year-old sea dog who had never held high command before arriving in America a year earlier, Graves was a harbor admiral; recovering from a small stroke, he had shuttled between his flagship and a comfortable house on Pearl Street without once in nineteen months venturing out past the Boston lighthouse. His talents were modest—the new promotion notwithstanding—and his grievances many. With thirty vessels in his squadron, but only four substantial ships of force, he was to ensure that Britannia ruled the waves along an eighteen-hundred-mile littoral, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Florida. Despite a stupendous increase in smuggling by American insurgents, he admitted that during this past winter “no seizures of any consequence have been made.”

Graves badgered the Admiralty with legitimate complaints about “properly guarding this extensive coast with the few vessels I have”; about the poor condition of those vessels—Hope was “very leaky,” and so were Halifax, Somerset, and others; about the difficulty of getting guns, pilots, provisions, and proper sailors; and about idiotic orders from home, including a directive to search the ballast of every ship arriving in North America for smuggled musket flints, as if ample flint could not be found in American rock. He also complained about General Gage, whom he detested and who detested him in return. With four nephews at sea in the king’s service, Graves was a master of nepotism; Lord North’s undersecretary, William Eden, would describe him this year as “a corrupt admiral without any shadow of capacity.” He was suspected, among other indiscretions, of selling stringy mutton on the Boston black market. Captain Evelyn spoke for many in asserting that “every man both in the army and navy wishes him recalled.”

Graves loathed “rebellious fanatics,” and in that smoke billowing from Noddle’s Island he spied a chance to show General Gage how they should be fought. At three p.m., a detachment of 170 marines from Glasgow, Cerberus, and Somerset landed on the island’s western flank. At the same time, the Diana, a new 120-ton armed schooner just that morning back from chasing gunrunners in Maine under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Graves—from the quartet of nephews—worked her way into Chelsea Creek, which separated the mainland from Noddle’s and Hog Islands. More marines followed Diana in a dozen longboats to cut off the rebel retreat. The pop of militia muskets now sounded from behind stone walls around the Winnisimet ferry landing. Diana answered with grapeshot and bore down on rebel drovers herding livestock through the shallows and onto Beach Road. Fifteen militiamen squatted in a Noddle’s marsh as a rear guard, swapping volleys with the regulars. “The bullets flew very thick,” Corporal Amos Farnsworth of Groton reported. “The balls sung like bees round our heads.” From the Cerberus quarterdeck, marines manhandled a pair of 3-pounders ashore and from a sandy embankment shelled the ferry landing.

Spattered with fire from both flanks, Lieutenant Graves decided that Diana had gone far enough. But as he sought to come about, the wind died. Longboats nosed alongside with hawsers to tow her down Chelsea Creek. Bullets smacked the water. Oarsmen bent low at the gunwales as the schooner inched back toward the wider harbor.

At twilight three hundred militia reinforcements rushed into the skirmish line with their own pair of 3-pounders, the first use of American field artillery in the war. In command was a stubby, rough-hewn brawler with a shock of white hair. Brigadier General Israel Putnam—“Old Put” to his men—was described by the Middlesex Journal as “very strongly made, no fat, all bones and muscles; he has a lisp in his speech and is now upwards of sixty years of age.” A wool merchant and farmer from Connecticut, barely literate, Putnam “dared to lead where any dared to follow,” one admirer observed; another called him “totally unfit for everything but fighting.” Stories had been told of him for decades in New England, most involving peril and great courage: how he once tracked down a wolf preying on his sheep, crawled headfirst into its den with a birch-bark torch to shoot it, then dragged the carcass out by the ears; how in the French war when a fire ignited a barracks, he organized a bucket brigade to save three hundred barrels of gunpowder, tossing pails of water onto the burning rafters from a ladder while wearing soaked mittens cut from a blanket; how he had been captured, starved, and tortured by Iroquois in 1758, and only the timely intervention of a French officer kept him from burning at the stake; how, after being shipwrecked on the Cuban coast during the Anglo-American expedition against Havana in 1762, he saved all hands by building rafts from spars and planks; how he had fought rebellious Indians near Detroit in Pontiac’s War of 1764, and later explored the Mississippi River valley; how he had left his plow upon hearing news of Lexington to ride a hundred miles in twenty-four hours to Cambridge. Now, wearing his scars and scorches like valor ribbons, he was ready to destroy Diana.

She was poised for destruction. After finally coming abreast of Winnisimet ferry just after ten p.m., the schooner was caught in a falling tide, her hull scraping bottom. The rebel fusillade from shore intensified, the gunners firing blindly at shadows on a moonless night, but vicious enough to kill two sailors, wound others, and cause the longboats to cast off their tow ropes. Lieutenant Graves tried to rig a kedge anchor and windlass to haul Diana free, but she stuck fast sixty yards from the beach, then heeled over onto her beam ends. The armed sloop Britannia eased close to pluck the crew from the canted deck as rebel 3-pounders boomed and Putnam, said to be wading waist-deep across the mudflats, shouted insults and blandishments in the dark. Swarming militiamen stripped the schooner of cannons, a dozen swivel guns, rigging, and sails, then piled hay under her bow and set it ablaze. At three a.m. flames reached the magazine, and Diana exploded in a fine rain of splintered oak.

Admiral of the White Graves buried his dead and ordered Somerset at dawn to fire long-range on the jubilant crowd capering along the Chelsea shore. Gage was disgusted by the schooner’s loss. “The general,” an aide wrote, “by no means approved of the admiral’s scheme, supposed it to be a trap, which it proved to be.” American raiders would return to the islands over the next two weeks, rustling another two thousand head of livestock while burning corn cribs, barns, and—heaping insult on the injuries—a storehouse that Graves had rented for cordage, lumber, and barrel staves.

“Heaven apparently and most evidently fights for us,” one Jonathan exulted. Putnam and his men returned to Cambridge in high feather. Diana’s mast had been salvaged and soon stood as a seventy-six-foot flagpole on Prospect Hill. A captured British barge with the sail hoisted was placed in a wagon and paraded around the Roxbury meetinghouse in early June to cheers and cannon salutes. “I wish,” Putnam was quoted as saying, “we have something of this kind to do every day.”

Gage declared martial law on June 12 with a long, windy denunciation of “the infatuated multitudes.” He offered to pardon those who “lay down their arms and return to the duties of peaceable subjects,” exclusive of Samuel Adams and John Hancock, “whose offenses are of too flagitious a nature” to forgive. He ended the screed with “God save the King.”

The same day, Gage wrote to Lord Barrington, the secretary at war, that “things are now come to that crisis that we must avail ourselves of every resource, even to raise the Negroes in our cause.… Hanoverians, Hessians, perhaps Russians may be hired.” To Lord Dartmouth he warned that he was critically low on both cash—he could not pay his officers—and forage; ships had been sent to Nova Scotia and Quebec seeking hay and oats. Crushing the rebellion, he estimated, would require more frigates and at least 32,000 soldiers, including 10,000 in New York, 7,000 around Lake Champlain, and 15,000 in New England. Another officer writing from Boston on June 12 advised London—the king himself received a copy—that the rebel blockade “is judicious & strong.” As for British operations, “all warlike preparations are wanting. No survey of the adjacent country, no proper boats for landing troops, not a sufficient number of horses for the artillery nor for the regimental baggage.” The war chest had “about three or four thousand [pounds] only remaining.… The rebellious colonies will supply nothing.”

Gage’s adjutant complained that “every idle report is carried to headquarters and … magnified to such a degree that rebels are seen in the air carrying cannon and mortars on their shoulders.” Some regulars longed for a decisive battle; “taking the bull by the horns” became an oft-heard phrase in the regiments. “I wish the Americans may be brought to a sense of their duty,” an officer wrote in mid-June. “One good drubbing, which I long to give them … might have a good effect.” As Captain Evelyn told his cousin in London, “If there is an honor in hard knocks, we are likely to have some share.”

The imminent arrival of transports with light dragoons, more marines, and several foot regiments would bring the British garrison to over six thousand troops, not enough to subdue Massachusetts, much less the continent, but sufficient, as Gage told London, to “make an attempt upon some of the rebel posts, which becomes every day more necessary.” Two alluring patches of high ground remained unfortified, and Gage knew from an informant that American commanders coveted the same slopes: the elevation beyond Boston Neck known as the Dorchester Heights, and the dominant terrain above Charlestown called Bunker, or Bunker’s Hill. A battle plan was made to seize the former on Sunday, June 18, with a bombardment of Roxbury while the rebels were at church, followed by the construction of two artillery redoubts on the heights. If all went well, regulars could then capture the high ground on Charlestown peninsula and eventually attack the American encampment at Cambridge.

No sooner was the plan conceived than it leaked to the Committee of Safety; British officers seemed incapable of keeping their mouths shut in a town full of American spies and eavesdroppers. Intelligence even came from New Hampshire, where a traveler out of Boston told authorities there about rumors of an imminent British sally. Meeting in Hastings House, a gambrel-roofed mansion near the Cambridge Common, the committee on June 15 voted unanimously that “the hill called Bunker’s Hill in Charlestown be securely kept and defended.” Dorchester Heights would have to wait until more guns and powder could be stockpiled.

The American camps bustled. Arms and ammunition were inspected, with each marching soldier to carry thirty rounds. A note to the Committee of Supply advised that “the army is destitute of shirts & trousers, and if any [are] in store, pray they may be sent.” Liquor sales stopped, again. Teamsters carted the books and scientific instruments from Harvard’s library to Andover for safekeeping. Organ pipes were yanked from the Anglican church and melted down for musket bullets. An ordnance storehouse issued all forty-eight shovels in stock as well as ammunition to selected regiments—typically forty or fifty pounds of powder, a thousand balls, and a few hundred flints. Commissaries in Cambridge and Roxbury reported that provisions arriving through June 16 included 1,869 loaves of bread and 357 gallons of milk from Cambridge vendors, 60 pairs of shoes from Milton, 1,570 pounds of beef and 40 barrels of beer from Watertown, a ton of candles, 1,500 pounds of soap, several hundred barrels of beans, peas, flour, and salt fish by the quintal, rum by the hogshead, and a few hundred tents, many without poles. All Massachusetts men within twenty miles of the coast were urged to carry their firelocks “to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they meet for public worship.” A sergeant from Wethersfield wrote his wife, “We’ve been in a great deal of hubbub.”

Orders spilled from the headquarters of Major General Ward, who occupied a southeast room on the Hastings House ground floor. Portly and sallow, sporting a powdered wig, boots, and a long coat with silver buttons, Artemas Ward, now forty-seven, had been chosen in February to command the Massachusetts militia on the strength of his long tenure in colonial politics. As a Harvard student, he once helped lead a campaign against “swearing and cursing” at the college; as a justice of the peace in Shrewsbury, he’d levied fines against the profane and could be found in the street reprimanding those who dishonored the Sabbath with unnecessary travel. Massachusetts, he believed, was home to the Chosen People. Ward had never fully recovered his health after the rigors of the French war, from which he’d emerged as a militia lieutenant colonel despite seeing little action. “Attacks of the stone”—kidney stones—still tormented him. Pious, honest, and devoted to the patriot cause, he was also taciturn, torpid, and stubborn. The gambit to hold Bunker Hill in Charlestown that he and the Committee of Safety had concocted was an impulse, not a plan. The rebel force lacked not only sufficient ammunition and field artillery but also combat reserves, a coherent chain of command, and even water. Ward had recently requested from the provincial congress almost sixty guns, fifteen hundred muskets, twenty tons of powder, and a similar quantity of lead; few of those munitions had been forthcoming.

Shortly after six p.m. on Friday, June 16, three Massachusetts regiments drifted through the arching elms and onto the Cambridge Common. They wore the usual homespun linen shirts and breeches tinted with walnut or sumac dye. Most carried a blanket or bedroll, often with a tumpline strap across the forehead to support the weight on their backs. A clergyman’s benediction droned over their bowed heads, and with a final amen they replaced their low-crowned hats and turned east down the Charlestown road.

Twilight faded and was gone, and the last birdsong faded with it. The first stars threw down their silver spears. Little rain had fallen in the past month, and dust boiled beneath each step. Candlelight gleamed from the rear of two bull’s-eye lanterns carried by sergeants at the head of the column. Officers commanded silence, and only the rattle of carts stacked with entrenching tools broke the quiet. Through parched orchards and across Willis Creek they marched, and past the hulking shadows of Prospect and Winter Hills. As they turned right toward Charlestown, a couple hundred Connecticut troops joined the column, bringing their strength to a thousand men.

General Ward had remained in his Hastings House headquarters, and the column was led by a sinewy, azure-eyed colonel wearing a blue coat with a single row of buttons and a tricorne hat. He carried a linen banyan. William Prescott of Pepperell, forty-nine and bookish, had fought twice in Canada during wars against the French, earning a reputation for cool self-possession under fire. In this war he reportedly had vowed never to be taken alive. “He was a bold man,” one soldier later wrote of him, “and gave his orders like a bold man.”

Bold orders this evening would prove to be ill-considered. As the procession crossed Charlestown Neck—barely ten yards wide at high tide—Prescott briefly conferred with the irrepressible Israel Putnam and Colonel Richard Gridley, an artilleryman and engineer who had also fought twice in Canada with distinction. From just below the isthmus, the three officers contemplated the dark contours of Charlestown peninsula, an irregular triangle a mile long and less than half that in width, bracketed by the Mystic and Charles Rivers. Even at night the dominant terrain was obvious: Bunker Hill rose gradually from the Neck for three hundred yards to a rounded crown 110 feet high, commanding not only the single land route off the peninsula, but the approach roads from Cambridge and Medford, as well as the adjacent waters. From the crest a low ridge swept southeast another six hundred yards to the patchwork of pastures, seventy-five feet high and sutured with rail fences, that would be called Breed’s Hill. Some fields had been scythed, the grass laid in windrows and cocks; in others it still stood waist-high. Brick kilns and clay pits pocked the steep eastern slope of the Breed’s pastures. Gardens and small orchards lay scattered to the west, backing the four hundred houses, shops, and buildings in Charlestown. Most of the three thousand residents had fled inland. The rising moon, three days past full, laved the town in amber light. Beyond the ferry landing and a spiny-masted warship in the Charles lay slumbering Boston.

For reasons never explained and certainly never understood, when the conference ended Prescott ordered the column to continue southeast. Colonel Gridley quickly staked out a redoubt—an imperfect square with sides about 130 feet long—not on nearly impregnable Bunker Hill, as the Committee of Safety had specified, but on the southwest slope of Breed’s pastureland. Accustomed to pick-and-shovel work, the men grabbed tools from the carts and began hacking at the hillside. Striking clocks in Boston, echoed at higher pitch by a ship’s bell, told them it was midnight.

The rhythmic chink of metal on hard ground carried to the Lively, another of those leaky vessels in the British squadron, now anchored astride the Charlestown ferryway. As coral light seeped across the eastern horizon at four a.m. on Saturday, June 17, the graveyard watch officer strained to decipher the odd sounds above the groan of the ship’s yards and the Charles whispering along her hull. He summoned the captain, whose spyglass soon showed hundreds of tiny dark figures tearing at the distant slope with spade and mattock.

The ship beat to quarters. Sailors tumbled from their hammocks, feet clapping across the deck as they ran to their battle stations. A windlass groaned as the crew winched Lively on her cable to align the starboard cannons. A shouted command carried across the gun deck, and tongues of flame burst from the ship in a broadside of 9-pounders. Breeching ropes kept the guns from flying across the deck in recoil; block and tackle ran them forward for the next salvo. Gunners swabbed the smoking barrels, rammed home powder and shot, and another flock of iron balls flew toward Breed’s Hill. Other ships eventually joined in—Glasgow, Symmetry, Falcon, Spitfire, more than seventy guns all told—along with 24-pounders from the Copp’s Hill battery in Boston’s North End.

Dawn, that great revealer of predicaments, had fully disclosed Colonel Prescott’s. Screaming cannonballs—“tea kettles,” in rebel slang—streaked overhead or punched into the hillside, smashing two hogsheads containing the American water supply. “The danger we were in made us think there was treachery, & that we were brought here to be all slain,” young Peter Brown would write his mother in Rhode Island. Distance and elevation reduced the bombardment’s effect, although Prescott recounted how one militiaman whose head abruptly vanished in a crimson mist “was so near me that my clothes were besmeared with his blood and brains, which I wiped off in some degree with a handful of fresh earth.” When other men dropped their tools to gawk at the corpse, Prescott snapped, “Bury him,” then strolled off with conspicuous nonchalance, hatless now, waggling his sword and urging the men to dig faster.

The redoubt taking shape was formidable enough, with thick dirt walls six feet high, fire steps for musketmen inside to stand on, and a sally port exit to the north. But no embrasures had been left for cannons; worse yet, Prescott recognized that the British could outflank him on either side. Gage’s men would no doubt attack in force across the Charles, seeking to stun the defenders with firepower before closing to complete the slaughter with bayonets. To protect his left flank, Prescott ordered the men to begin building a low breastwork northeast from the sally port to marshy ground at the foot of Breed’s Hill.

He also sent an officer to plead for reinforcements, provisions, and water. Artillerymen refused to lend the courier a horse, forcing him to walk four miles to Cambridge, which he found “quiet as the Sabbath.” At Hastings House he discovered Dr. Warren, newly appointed as a major general despite his lack of military experience, splayed on an upstairs bed with a crippling headache. General Ward, tormented with another attack of the stone, fretted over the vulnerability of Roxbury, the Dorchester Heights, and his Cambridge supply dumps; British gunfire had been reported at Boston Neck. Not least, Ward worried that only twenty-seven half-barrels of powder remained in his magazines, perhaps enough for forty thousand cartridges. With consent from the Committee of Safety, he reluctantly agreed to send reinforcements to Prescott from the New Hampshire militia camped along the Mystic.

The deep boom of Lively’s broadsides had wakened General Gage, as it woke all of Boston. Province House, aglitter in candlelight, soon bustled with red uniforms. Messengers skipped up the broad stone steps from Marlborough Street with news of rebel entrenchments, then skipped back down with orders to find and fetch various commanders. Young officers eager to join the coming attack loitered in the hallway, hoping to be noticed. Sleepy aides fumbled about for decent maps, of which the British still had precious few. Concussion ghosts from the harbor bombardment rattled the windows, and the rap of drums beating assembly carried from the camps.

Several senior officers joined Gage in the council chamber, including Percy, who arrived from his house in nearby Winter Street. But it was three newcomers who drew the eye this morning: Major Generals William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton had reached Boston in late May aboard the Cerberus, after a stormy voyage that killed two favorite horses but gave the three men ample time to find common ground for the campaign ahead despite their inevitable rivalry. “The sentiments of Howe, Clinton, and myself have been unanimous from the beginning,” Burgoyne declared. The king had personally approved their selection, fearing that without vigorous new leadership in America “we shall only vegetate.” They were deemed “the fittest men for the service in the army,” as one official in London observed, forming what Burgoyne called “a triumvirate of reputation.”

Others were not so sure. Horace Walpole, ever astringent, told his diary that Howe “was reckoned sensible, though so silent that nobody knew whether he was or not,” while Burgoyne was “a vain, very ambitious man, with a half understanding that was worse than none.” Clinton, he declared, “had not that fault, for he had no sense at all.” Their arrival at Long Wharf aboard a frigate named for the mythical three-headed hound guarding the gates of Hades inspired the war’s most enduring doggerel: “Behold the Cerberus, the Atlantic plough, / Her precious cargo, Burgoyne, Clinton, Howe, / Bow, wow, wow!” Thereafter known as the three bow-wows, they had wasted little time in undercutting Gage’s authority, as in Burgoyne’s barbed observation to General Harvey earlier that week that it was “no reflection to say he is unequal to his present station, for few characters in the world would be fit for it.… It requires a genius of the very first class.”

As the windows trembled and the Old South clock across the street struck the hours, the high command, genius or otherwise, heatedly debated what to do. General Clinton, a dimple-chinned, prickly, and gifted tactician, proposed the boldest course. Early that morning, he had made his own reconnaissance in the dark along the Boston waterfront, listening to the racket from the rebel entrenchment. If Howe and the main British force crossed directly from the North End to Charlestown, Clinton would lead five hundred men ashore in a surprise flanking attack within musket shot of the isthmus, severing the American line of retreat and trapping the enemy on the peninsula.

This scheme found little favor around Gage’s council table. Dividing the force would risk defeat in detail of the separate detachments, particularly if thousands of rebel reinforcements stormed the battlefield from Cambridge. Naval support would be tenuous: even shallow-draft vessels had difficulty in the Mystic, which had not been thoroughly sounded, and a milldam west of Charlestown Neck complicated navigation there. No one had forgotten Diana’s fate in shoal water. Every small boat would be needed to ferry at least fifteen hundred regulars from Boston to Morton’s Point on the peninsula. The amphibious assault would have to be made at “full sea”—high tide, close to three p.m.—so that artillery could be manhandled onto dry land rather than through the muddy shallows.

Gage chose a more conventional, direct assault to be led by Howe, the senior major general. As in the march to Concord, most flanker companies—light infantry and grenadiers—had been peeled from their regiments and collected in special battalions. Ten companies of each would muster at Long Wharf, bolstered by several other regiments. The remaining light infantry and grenadiers, backed by additional regiments, would embark at North Battery, with sundry marines and regulars in reserve.

Gage ended the conference with a stark order: “Any man who shall quit his ranks on any pretense, or shall dare to plunder or pillage, will be executed without mercy.” With a clatter of boots across the floor, officers hurried down the hall and out the door to prepare their commands for battle.

Admiral Graves, meanwhile, had left his flagship to board the seventy-gun Somerset, now anchored in deep water across Boston Harbor. From her gently rocking quarterdeck he could see rebels swarming across the Charlestown hillside around the new earthworks; many were already “entrenched to their chins,” as a British officer noted. Men-of-war belched smoke and noise, and tiny black cannonballs traced perfect parabolas against the summer sky, plumping the fields and splintering tree branches without excessive inconvenience to the Jonathans building their forts. To Graves’s frustration, the waters lapping Charlestown were too shallow for Somerset and other dreadnoughts to warp close; his larger ships would be limited to sending seamen, ammunition, and boats to their smaller sisters.

As the morning ticked by, Glasgow and Symmetry hammered Charlestown Neck from an anchorage west of the peninsula, supported by a pair of scows, each mounting a 12-pounder. But the ebbing tide kept them from nosing near the milldam, and Graves regretted his failure to build more floating batteries and gun rafts. Lively, Falcon, and little Spitfire glided into the Charlestown channel, popping away while preparing to cover Howe’s landing. The roar of the cannonade carried to Cambridge, Roxbury, and other villages; one terrified minister’s wife draped blankets over her windows in hopes of deflecting stray bullets.

Shortly before noon, as meridian heat began to build in Boston, long columns of regulars tramped to fife and drum through the town’s cobbled streets from the Common to the docks. Each man carried, as ordered, sixty rounds, a day’s cooked provisions, and a blanket. The 52nd Foot had been issued gleaming new muskets and bayonets that very morning; they would soon grow filthy with use. By chance, a portion of the 49th Foot had just arrived after a long passage from southern Ireland. Wide-eyed privates, wobbly on their pins after weeks at sea, disembarked on Long Wharf and marched toward the Common with flags flying and drums beating even as the grenadier and light infantry companies from other regiments clambered into the bobbing boats at Long Wharf for the first lift to Charlestown.

At one-thirty p.m., a blue pennant appeared on Preston’s signal halyard. Twenty-eight yawls, longboats, cutters, and ketches carrying twelve hundred soldiers pulled away from Long Wharf in a double column, oars winking in syncopation, with a half dozen brass field guns nestled into the lead boats. The cannonade from the ships had ebbed, but now it grew heavier than ever, balls flying, smoke billowing, and the din reverberating like a terrible thunder. Thousands crowded Boston’s rooftops and hillsides, perching on tree boughs and clinging to steeples. Among the spectators were regulars left behind and the wives of troops now gliding across the Charles. Loyalists and patriots stood together, aware that sons and fathers and lovers were down there somewhere in harm’s way, on the glinting water or the distant hillside.

Here again was an ancient, squalid secret: that war was an enchantment, a sorcery, a seductive spectacle like no other, beguiling the eye and gorging the senses. They looked because they could not look away. Atop Bunker Hill, a Connecticut chaplain named David Avery watched the sculling boats approach Morton’s Point, then raised both arms to heaven before asking God’s indulgence on “a scene most awful and tremendous.”

Astride a lathered white horse, his own halo of tangled white hair instantly recognizable, General Israel Putnam trotted back and forth across the American line in a sleeveless waistcoat, smacking shirkers with the flat of his sword. To an officer pleading with a reluctant militiaman, Putnam snapped, “Run him through if he won’t fight.” One captain would later reflect that Old Put resembled not a field commander so much as the foreman of “a band of sicklemen or ditchers.… He might be brave, and had certainly an honest manliness about him; but it was thought, and perhaps with reason, that he was not what the time required.”

Nine Massachusetts regiments had been ordered to Charlestown from Cambridge, but at best only five had reached the peninsula; the others were delayed, misdirected, or misinformed. No one seemed to have a map. Roads were confusing, the terrain foreign. Troop discipline was “extremely irregular,” one officer wrote, “each regiment advancing according to the opinions, feelings, or caprice of its commander.” Putnam had ordered entrenching tools carried back from the redoubt to belatedly build a fortification on Bunker Hill; eager volunteers grabbed a shovel or an ax, then retreated toward the Neck and beyond, never to return. By one count, fewer than 170 men remained with Prescott to hold his redoubt, officers included. “To be plain,” an observer would write Samuel Adams, “it appears to me there never was more confusion and less command.”

Happily for the American cause, some men knew their business. Colonel Prescott continued to improve his imperfect fort and the adjacent breastwork, positioning men and shouting encouragement. Roughly two hundred yards behind the breastwork, a tall, enterprising captain from eastern Connecticut, Thomas Knowlton, recognized the defensive potential of a rail livestock fence that extended northeast for several hundred yards, from the middle of the peninsula almost to the Mystic. The fence had been laid on a slight zigzag course and assembled with a method known as stake-and-rider; a portion of it straddled a two-foot stone wall. Two hundred men helped Captain Knowlton reinforce the southwestern length of the barrier with additional rails and posts scavenged from other fields. They then stuffed the gaps with haycocks and sheaves of cut grass to give the illusion of a solid parapet. Several small field guns hauled by horses from Cambridge were emplaced nearby.

As the British boats beat from Boston, the most critical rebel reinforcements reached Charlestown Neck to the thrum of fife and drum: hundreds of long-striding New Hampshire militiamen, described as a “moving column of uncouth figures clad in homespun.” Millers, mariners, and husbandmen, they included the largest regiment in New England, commanded by Colonel John Stark, the lean, beetle-browed son of a Scottish emigrant. Stark’s picaresque life had included capture by Indians while hunting in 1752 and his release six weeks later for a hefty ransom. As a Ranger officer in the last French war, he had plodded more than forty miles in snowshoes to fetch help for comrades wounded in an ambush. After surviving the bloody Anglo-American repulse by the French at Fort Carillon in 1758, he and two hundred men subsequently built an eighty-mile road from Crown Point to the Connecticut valley. Upon hearing the news of Lexington, Stark, now forty-six, left his sawmill and his wife, pregnant with their ninth child, and was elected colonel by a unanimous show of hands in a tavern; so many men rallied to him that thirteen companies filled his regiment. At eleven this morning, General Ward’s initial order to reinforce Charlestown reached Stark’s camp in Medford, four miles up the Mystic. As he would tell the New Hampshire Provincial Congress a few days later, “The battle soon came on.”

Stark sent an advance detachment of two hundred men to the peninsula, then tarried long enough at a house converted into an armory for the rest of his force to draw ammunition: fifteen balls, a flint, and a gill cup of powder—five ounces—for each musketman. Crossing the narrow isthmus shortly after two p.m., harassed with round, bar, and chain shot from Royal Navy guns, the Hampshiremen ascended Bunker Hill at a deliberate pace, then descended to the northeast lip of the peninsula. “One fresh man in action,” Stark told a captain, “is worth ten fatigued ones.” A quick glance disclosed the American peril: despite Knowlton’s deft work along the rail fence, and the hasty construction of three small triangular earthworks known as flèches closer to the redoubt, Prescott’s position could still be outflanked by redcoats advancing up the Mystic shoreline. To block the narrow, muddy beach, Stark’s men scooted down the eight-foot riverbank and quickly stacked fieldstones to build a short, stout wall. Most Hampshiremen took positions behind the fence to extend Knowlton’s line, further stuffing it with hay, grass, and stray rails. But sixty musketmen arranged themselves on the beach in a triple row behind the new barricade. There they awaited their enemy.

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 flèches, 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 flèches 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 flèches. 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.”

Through Saturday night and all day Sunday, as artillery grumbled in the distance, blood-slick wagons, chaises, sedan chairs, wood carts, and barrows hauled broken men from the wharves to makeshift hospitals, barracks, and rooming houses. “The streets were filled with the wounded and the dying, the sight of which, with the lamentations of the women and children over their husbands and fathers, pierced one to the soul,” a British official wrote. A woman in Boston told her brother of watching redcoats hobble through town, tormented by flies and pleading for water, “some without noses, some with but one eye, broken legs and arms.” Shock and hemorrhage killed many before they reached a surgeon’s table; gangrene would kill more. The first coach to the Manufactory House—built two decades earlier for the working poor to make linen and now a general hospital—contained a dying major and three dead captains; the second coach carried four more dead officers. The loyalist judge Peter Oliver encountered a soldier stumbling through town, “his white waistcoat, breeches & stockings being very much dyed by a scarlet hue”; the man told Oliver, “I have three bullets through me,” then tottered off. A captain who arrived from England on Sunday wrote his father of finding “wounded and dead officers in every street. Bells tolling, wounded soldiers lying in their tents and crying for assistance to remove some men who had just expired.… They remained in this deplorable situation for three days.”

Captain George Harris, shot in the head near the redoubt, was saved by trepanning, the boring of a hole in the skull to relieve the pressure from bleeding. Doctors positioned a mirror “so as to give me a sight of my own brain,” he later wrote a cousin. “It may convince you and the rest of the world that I have such a thing.” Others were less jocular. “I have received two balls, one in my groin and the other near the breast,” a wounded soldier wrote his family, according to an account published after the war. “The surgeons inform me that three hours will be the utmost I can survive.” Richard Hope, a surgeon in the 52nd Foot, described how the regiment suffered thirty privates killed in action and eighty wounded, “a fourth part of whom will die.… It would pierce a heart of stone to hear the daily shrieks and lamentations of the poor widows and fatherless left desolate and friendless three thousand miles from home.” The dead included Major Roger Spendlove, who in four decades with the 43rd Foot had survived wounds at Quebec, Martinique, and Havana. Private Clement Nicholson of the 38th Foot had survived a thousand lashes for desertion the previous year, meted out in four ferocious sets of 250, but Bunker Hill would kill him, too.

A physician examining gunshot victims described the “yellowness of the face, paleness of the extremities, a falling of the pulse.” Treatment was not far removed from such medieval remedies as pigeon blood for eye wounds or the liberal use of “oil of whelps,” an ointment made with earthworms, white wine, and the flesh of dogs boiled alive. Surgeons probed wounded arms and legs with their unwashed fingers, feeling for bone fragments, whose presence indicated a need for immediate amputation. A surgical text recommended that a doctor preparing to lop off a man’s limb with a saw “avoid terrifying him with the appearance of the apparatus [and] avoid a useless crowd of spectators.” Lucky patients got a grain of opium or a swig of rum, and their ears stuffed with lamb’s wool to mask the sound of the sawing. Many were less fortunate. Amputations above the knee took only thirty seconds, but no more than half the patients survived the ordeal or the subsequent sepsis. Orderlies sloshed vinegar across the bloody floor and heaved the next patient onto the plank table. As for those shot in the abdomen, a sniff of a lint probe inserted into the wound would reveal whether gut contamination had set in, in which case, a medical text advised, “we lay the patient quietly in bed, there to take his fate.”

“Many of the wounded are daily dying, and many must have both legs amputated,” wrote one surgeon, who asserted that rebel gunmen fired nails and iron scrap to inflict maximum damage. Some had also fired pebbles, but only because they had no more bullets. By one tally, only half of the more than eight hundred wounded regulars would ultimately be declared “cured, fit for service.” Many in the coming months would also be tormented, sometimes fatally, by “the Yanky”—dysentery, in British slang.

A few miles away, the Yankees also suffered. A New Hampshire surgeon who rushed to Cambridge with a bullet extractor of his own design reported, “I amputated several limbs and extracted many balls the first night.” American casualties approached 450, including 138 dead. More than thirty American prisoners, many of them wounded, were dumped at Long Wharf under guard on Saturday night, then jailed the next day; most would be dead by September, foreshadowing the treatment captured Americans could expect in British custody. A surgeon who packed up his instruments in Andover and galloped to Cambridge wrote of the terrible uncertainty besetting a hundred New England towns: “It was not known who were among the slain or living, the wounded or the well.” Those who learned the worst soon submitted sad claims for restitution, like Mary Pierce of Pepperell, the widow of a private in Prescott’s regiment. She requested compensation of five pounds, twelve shillings for his lost coat, trousers, stockings, shoes, buckles, silk handkerchief, knife, and tobacco box.

To many American fighters, the battle now called Bunker Hill felt like defeat. Ground had been given, the peninsula lost. Many were furious at what a Connecticut captain called a “shameful and scandalous” retreat. Rumors spread of betrayal, of treacherous officers, of gunpowder adulterated with sand, “all of which creates great uneasiness in the camp,” a former Boston selectman told his diary. Three artillery companies had performed dismally. Several timid commanders faced court-martial and dismissal from the service. American generalship had been muddled and indecisive, leaving the force “commanded without order and God knows by whom,” a senior officer wrote. Although the Essex Gazette claimed Putnam was “inspired by God Almighty with a military genius,” Colonel Stark denounced him as “a poltroon.” Much blame fell on Artemas Ward, “a general destitute of all military ability,” in the opinion of the new president of the provincial congress, James Warren.

The incineration of Charlestown, the first of several American towns to be obliterated during the war, stirred both sorrow and rage. A survey found that 232 houses, 95 barns, 76 shops, 25 warehouses, a dozen mills, 81 miscellaneous buildings, and 17 wharves had burned, with losses exceeding £100,000. Of 450 eventual claims, some came from Bostonians who had moved their household goods to Charlestown for safekeeping, like Sarah Hunstable, who lost nine feather beds, six mahogany chairs, three looking glasses, and more. A church census calculated that two thousand residents had been consigned to “the most aggravated exile.”

Yet the battle would soon be seen as a triumph of patriot moxie. “I wish [we] could sell them another hill at the same price,” observed a new brigadier general from Rhode Island named Nathanael Greene. The lawyer William Tudor wrote John Adams on June 26, “The ministerial troops gained the hill, but were victorious losers. A few more such victories, and they are undone.” Even if Prescott and his comrades were not “supported in a proper manner,” wrote Samuel Gray from Roxbury, “this battle has been of infinite service to us—made us more vigilant, watchful, and cautious.” Bunker Hill also reinforced the conviction that inflamed citizen soldiers, summoned to battle from field or shop, could hold their own against professional legions, a charming myth that took deep root and would nearly prove the undoing of America. Cheeky rebels soon appropriated a scornful British ditty to serve as a defiant American anthem. “‘Yankee Doodle’ is now their paean, a favorite of favorites,” a British officer said, “esteemed as warlike as ‘The Grenadiers’ March.’”

For days, Yankees with spyglasses in Roxbury and on Dorchester Heights watched the regulars dig graves. With so many dead men to bury, Gage ordered the mourning bells in Boston silenced. Fallen officers like Major Pitcairn found graves in sanctified ground at Old North or in other churchyards. Their effects were quickly auctioned off in officers’ messes or, as in the case of Lieutenant Colonel Abercrombie, at “the large tree in front of the encampment of the 22nd Regiment”: swords, pistols, silk waistcoats, fancy hats, mattresses, spurs, all sold to the highest bidder. Page after page of new promotion announcements soon appeared; there was nothing like a bloodletting to advance careers.

Privates were laid in a common pit on the marshy ground between Breed’s and Bunker Hills, then dusted with twenty barrels of quicklime. Many who died of their wounds were consigned to trenches on Boston Common. The American dead on the peninsula were dumped without ceremony into mass graves or hasty bury holes, including Joseph Warren, interred with an anonymous companion in a farmer’s frock. Captain Walter Laurie, who had commanded the star-crossed detachment at Concord Bridge, told London that his burial detail had found Warren’s body and “stuffed the scoundrel with another rebel into one hole, and there he & his seditious principles may remain.” Grave robbing became so pernicious on the peninsula that Howe threatened severe punishment for malefactors. “Added to the meanness of such a practice,” he warned, “a pestilence from the infection of the putrefied bodies might reach the camp.”

Midsummer gloom pervaded that camp, despite efforts to depict the battle as a triumph. “Another such,” Clinton said, “would have ruined us.” A cynical officer suggested that the rebels should plan “to lose a battle every week ’til the British army was reduced to nothing.” On June 23, Gage ordered an assault on Dorchester Heights, then quickly canceled the attack, convincing himself that he could command the heights with artillery if necessary. Resentments festered among his officers, at the combat shortcomings of their rank and file—“discipline, not to say courage, was wanting,” Burgoyne sniffed—and at the high command. “From an absurd and destructive confidence, carelessness, or ignorance, we have lost a thousand of our best men and officers,” a seething officer wrote. “We were all wrong at the head.”

Gage waited eight days to tell London of Bunker Hill, in a nineteen-sentence dispatch that was spare to the point of duplicity. “This action,” he asserted, “has shown the superiority of the king’s troops who … defeated above three times their own number.” An oversized casualty chart with perfectly lined columns contained delicate calligraphic flourishes on the k’s and w’s that at least gave ornamentation to the killed and wounded. But in a private note to Lord Dartmouth, Gage conceded that casualties were “greater than our force can afford to lose.… The rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be.… Your Lordship will perceive that the conquest of this country is not easy.” In a letter to Barrington on June 26, Gage added, “These people … are now spirited up by a rage and enthusiasm as great as ever people were possessed of.” He continued:

You must proceed in earnest or give the business up. The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear. Small armies can’t afford such losses.… I wish this cursed place was burned.

The news stunned England. Newspapers promptly published maps of Bunker Hill, which were studied intently by fretful readers. “The ministers now saw America was lost, or not to be recovered but by long time and expense,” Walpole told his journal. “Yet, not daring to own their miscarriage, pushed on.” Rumors circulated that fratricide had caused half of all British losses, that regulars had thrown down their arms rather than fight, that a disgraced General Gage had returned to England dressed as his wife. In fact, Margaret Kemble Gage came home dressed as herself aboard the three-masted Charming Nancy, accompanying sixty widows and orphans, plus 170 badly wounded soldiers. Correspondents who met the ship in Plymouth described “a most shocking spectacle,” including “some without legs, and others without arms, and their clothes hanging on them like a loose morning gown.” Many were said to be “in a state of complete alcoholic dependence.” The Plymouth guildhall collected donations for the widows—sixteen shillings each. One writer, upon viewing this homecoming, concluded that “60,000 men would not be able to bring the Americans under subjection.” William Eden wrote Lord North, “If we have eight more such victories, there will be nobody left to bring the news of them.”

The king held firm, of course. For months British newspapers would chronicle the presentation of wounded officers at court, as in this announcement: “Yesterday Captain Cockering, who lost his arm at Bunker’s Hill, was introduced to His Majesty at St. James’s.… His Majesty was pleased to present him with a captain’s commission in a company of invalids.” The king also decided, as Barrington informed Gage, that injury compensation would be paid, retroactive to Lexington. An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year’s pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year’s pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were “deemed slain in battle.” No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

Another deranged afternoon had come and gone in Massachusetts, and yet that awful Saturday lingered for every man in harm’s way. “Some other mode must be adopted than gaining every little hill at the expense of a thousand Englishmen,” Glanville Evelyn of the King’s Own told his family. Just before midnight on June 17, Evelyn had taken a moment to write his will, philosophically reflecting that those in “the profession of arms hold their lives by a more precarious tenure than any other body of people.”

As Captain Evelyn pondered the future, others tried to forget the past. Reverend David Osgood, a New Hampshire regimental chaplain, would recall as an old man how for the remaining eight years of war after Bunker Hill “a burden lay upon my spirits.… Visions of horror rose in my imagination, and disturbed my rest.” A British officer in the 63rd Regiment of Foot could only agree. “The shocking carnage that day,” Major Francis Bushill Sill wrote in a letter home, “never will be erased out of my mind ’till the day of my death.”

4.
What Shall We Say of Human Nature?

CAMBRIDGE CAMP, JULY–OCTOBER 1775

A sultry overcast thickened above the American encampments on Sunday morning, July 2. By order of General Ward, company officers had begun scrutinizing their troops during daily formation for signs of smallpox. Militiamen marched to prayer services for yet another sermon on the evils of profanity. At General Putnam’s suggestion, they sometimes shouted Amen! loud enough to alarm British sentries.

Even on the Sabbath, British cannons pummeled Roxbury. “The balls came rattling through the houses,” a soldier told his diary. “They neither killed nor wounded any of our men, which seems almost impossible.” The Yankees answered with a pointless spatter of musketry. Heavy rain began to fall at eleven a.m., sharpening the camp odors of green firewood, animal manure, and human waste. Private Samuel Haws updated his journal: “July 1. Nothing remarkable this day. July 2. Ditto.” Private Phineas Ingalls was a bit more descriptive in his Sunday diary entry: “Rained. A new general from Philadelphia.”

Possibly not one of the seventeen thousand soldiers now under his command in Massachusetts knew what George Washington of Virginia looked like. Few Americans did. Imaginary portraits that bore no resemblance to him had been sketched and printed in the penny sheets after his unanimous selection by the Continental Congress seventeen days earlier to be “general and commander-in-chief of the American forces,” a host to be known as the Continental Army. Now here he was in the flesh, trotting past the sodden pickets just after noon with a small cavalry escort and baggage that included a stack of books on generalship, notably Military Instructions for Officers Detached in the Field and a volume with copperplate diagrams on how to build fortifications and otherwise run a war. At Hastings House, a dour Ward handed over his orderly book to the man Private Haws soon called “Lesemo,” a perversion of generalissimo. No salute was fired; the Lesemo’s new army could not spare the powder.

“His personal appearance is truly noble and majestic, being tall and well-proportioned,” wrote a doctor in Cambridge. “His dress is a blue coat with buff-colored facings, a rich epaulet on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword, a black cockade in his hat.” At age forty-three, he was all that and more: over six feet tall, but so erect he seemed taller; nimble for a large man, as demonstrated on many a dance floor, and so graceful in the saddle that some reckoned him the finest horseman of the age; fair skin that burned easily, lightly spattered with smallpox pits and stretched across high cheekbones beneath wide-set slate-blue eyes; fine hair with a hint of auburn, tied back in a queue. He had first lost teeth in the French and Indian War, symptomatic of the perpetual dental miseries that kept him from smiling much. “His appearance alone gave confidence to the timid and imposed respect on the bold,” in one soldier’s estimation, or, as a Connecticut congressman observed, “No harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm.” Abigail Adams, who would invite Washington to coffee soon after his arrival, told her husband, John, “Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” Clearly smitten, she paraphrased the English poet John Dryden: “Mark his majestic fabric! He’s a temple / Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine.” John Adams, in turn, noted that Washington “possessed the gift of silence,” a virtue rarely found in Lawyer Adams.

Washington’s other traits, if less visible, would soon become conspicuous enough to those he commanded. Born into Virginia’s planter class, he was ambitious and dogged, with a resolve that made him seem tireless. If unquestionably brave, diligent, and sensible, he could also be humorless, aloof, and touchy about his lack of formal education. Those military books in his kit were merely the latest texts of a lifelong autodidact; as a youth he had famously copied 110 maxims from the English translation of a Jesuit etiquette manual, including, “Let your countenance be pleasant but in serious matters somewhat grave.… Do not puff up in the cheeks, loll not out the tongue.… Cleanse not your teeth with the tablecloth.” As a twenty-three-year-old colonel commanding Virginia’s provincial forces in the last French war, he had been with Braddock—and Thomas Gage—for the disaster on the Monongahela, surviving four bullets through his uniform, another through his hat, and two horses shot dead beneath him, before dragging his mortally wounded commander across the river and riding sixty miles for help in covering the British retreat. That ordeal—more than four hundred British dead, including wounded men scalped or burned alive—gave Washington a tincture of indestructibility while convincing him that “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence” had protected him “beyond all human probability.”

He had shed the uniform in 1758, telling his officers, “It really was the greatest honor of my life to command gentlemen who made me happy in their company and easy by their conduct.” Over the subsequent seventeen years, he paid little attention to military matters. Yet that experience of observing British commanders, organizing military expeditions, and leading men in battle had served Washington well. He was a talented administrator, with a brain suited to executive action, thanks to a remarkable memory, a knack for incisive thinking and clear writing, and a penchant for detail, learned first as a young officer and then practiced daily as suzerain of his sprawling, complex estate on the Potomac River at Mount Vernon. His fortunes, personal and pecuniary, grew considerably in 1759 when he married Virginia’s richest widow, the amiable and attractive Martha Dandridge Custis. Over the years, their convenient business arrangement had become a love match.

Great responsibility would enlarge him. His youthful vainglory—“I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound,” he had written his brother in 1754—had been supplanted by a more mature reflection that those charming bullets meant dead boys and sobbing mothers. War at its core, he acknowledged, was “gloom & horror.” Once keen to advance himself and his interests, whether as a land speculator or a young colonel on the make, he now displayed a becoming, if artful, modesty. He was seen as “noble and disinterested,” in John Adams’s phrase: ecumenical, judicious, formal but not regal, emblematic of republican virtues in sacrificing personal interest to the greater public good, yet elevated above the republican riffraff. As a passionate supporter of the American cause, a well-connected and native-born political figure, and a man “strongly bent to arms,” in his phrase, Washington was all but the inevitable choice to become commander in chief. Although he refrained from overtly angling for the post, he had worn his Virginia militia uniform in Congress to remind his fellow delegates of his combat experience. He had declined the offer of a $500 monthly salary, accepting only reimbursement for his expenses. From ferry fares and saddle repairs to grog and Madeira, those would be carefully logged in his account ledgers, beginning with the five horses and the light phaeton he bought before leaving Philadelphia.

Washington professed to be fighting for “all that is dear and valuable in life” against a British regime intent on “despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us”—a curious sentiment from someone who owned 135 slaves, including the intrepid Billy Lee, purchased for £61 and now at his side in Cambridge. Clearly he nursed resentments: at the preference given British land speculators, the imperial restrictions on western expansion, and the large debts accumulated with British merchants. Twice he had tried to ascend from the Virginia provincials by securing regular commissions for himself and his officers, and twice he had been snubbed. British tax policies jeopardized his commercial ambitions and offended his moral equilibrium; the royal governor in Virginia had threatened, through a technicality, to annul land grants issued twenty years earlier, which would have stripped Washington of twenty-three thousand wilderness acres.

Yet just as clearly he saw the glory of the American cause: a continental empire to be built upon republican ideals, buttressed with American mettle, ambition, and genius. He also knew that it could all end badly on a Tower Hill scaffold, as it had for the Jacobite rebels of 1745. Thousands had been arrested and at least eighty hanged or beheaded; some of their skulls were still displayed on spikes at Temple Bar in central London. As a precaution, Washington had drafted his will before leaving Philadelphia.

Few would guess that the imposing, confident figure who rode into Cambridge that Sunday afternoon concealed his own anxieties and insecurities. In tears he had told a fellow Virginian, Patrick Henry, “From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.” He also lamented leaving Martha alone in Virginia. “It has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service,” he wrote her. “I go fully trusting in the Providence, which has been more bountiful to me than I deserve.… I retain an unalterable affection for you, which neither time or distance can change.” To his brother he confided, “I am embarked on a wide ocean, boundless in its prospect & from whence, perhaps, no safe harbor is to be found.”

Washington would soon move his headquarters into the vacant Vassall House in Cambridge, a gray, three-story Georgian mansion that had been abandoned by its loyalist owner. The orchards, outbuildings, and sweeping vista of the Charles evoked his beloved Mount Vernon, although the house had been used by medicos after Bunker Hill and then as a bivouac by a Marblehead regiment; sanding grease and filth from the floors took more than a week. Washington chose a high-ceilinged, ground-floor room with Delft tile for his bedchamber, parked his new phaeton and saddle horses in the stable, and then set out to fulfill his marching orders from Congress: “take every method in your power, consistent with prudence, to destroy or make prisoners of all persons who are now, or who hereafter shall appear in arms against the good people of the United Colonies.” Greene, the young Rhode Island general, would later observe of Washington’s arrival, “It seemed as if the spirit of conquest breathed through the whole army.”

Washington needed little time to grasp the lay of the land. The former surveyor’s mahogany-and-brass spyglass showed two armies barely a mile apart, squinting “at one another like wildcats across a gutter,” in one officer’s description. The enemy was “strongly entrenched on Bunker’s Hill,” Washington wrote on July 10 to John Hancock, who as new president of the Continental Congress would be his primary correspondent in Philadelphia. Charlestown Neck had been ditched, palisaded, and fraised to thwart an American attack. White British tents covered the peninsula, and three floating batteries on the Mystic commanded the isthmus. In Roxbury, felled trees and earthen parapets blocked the Neck; many of the buildings that were still standing had been smashed or burned by incessant enemy cannonading. Washington’s own “troops of the United Provinces of North America,” as he grandly called them, occupied more than 230 buildings from Cambridge to Brookline, two dozen of which were used as hospitals. The enemy’s strength was reckoned at 11,500—almost twice the number Gage actually had fit for duty. “Between you and me,” Washington wrote a Virginia friend, “I think we are in an exceeding dangerous situation.”

Commands cascaded from his headquarters, the first of twelve thousand orders and letters to be issued in his name over the next eight years. Officers of the guard were to stop bantering with British sentries. All strongpoints must be defended; officers were to examine batteries to be sure that American guns were actually pointed toward the enemy. Pikes should be “greased twice a week,” and thirteen-foot lances would be made to complement the hundreds of shorter spears already ordered, though chestnut and other brittle wood ought to be avoided. Blacksmiths were authorized to work on Sundays. Because so few Yankees wore uniforms, rank would be color-coded: senior field-grade officers were to wear red or pink cockades in their hats; captains would wear yellow or buff; subalterns, green. A strip of red cloth pinned on the shoulder signified a sergeant; green indicated a corporal. Generals wore chest sashes: purple for major generals, pink for brigadiers, light blue for the commander in chief. Washington agreed to be called “your excellency,” despite private grumbling about the imperial implication. “New lords, new laws,” the troops told one another.

The Continental Congress had appointed thirteen lesser generals, mostly New Englanders, to serve under His Excellency. The only three who could be considered professional military veterans were former British officers—none had risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel—who had recently thrown in with the rebels. Washington quickly organized his army into three “grand divisions,” each commanded by a major general and composed of two brigades, typically with six regiments apiece. Ward led the division on the right wing, around Boston Neck. Putnam commanded the center, at Cambridge. The division on the left wing, overlooking Bunker Hill and ruined Charlestown, was led by Charles Lee, a brusque, vivid eccentric who had spent a quarter century in the king’s service before immigrating to America in 1773. Rather than the twenty-five thousand troops he had expected, Washington found—after excruciating efforts to get a reliable tally—that his host had less than fourteen thousand men actually present and fit for duty around Boston.

For every moment when Washington drew his sword or spurred his horse to the sound of the guns, there would be a thousand administrative moments: dictating orders, scribbling letters, convening meetings, hectoring, praising, adjudicating. No sooner had he settled into Vassall House than he recognized that he personally needed to oversee the smallest aspects of the army’s operation, from camp kettles to bread quality to the $333 paid an unidentified spy—and logged in his expense book in mid-July—“to go into the town of Boston … for the purpose of conveying intelligence of the enemy’s movements and designs.” He quickly saw that unlike the fantasy army that existed in congressional imaginations—grandly intended, as Washington’s commission declared, “for the defense of American liberty and for repelling every hostile invasion thereof”—this army was woefully unskilled; bereft of artillery and engineering expertise, it was led by a very thin officer corps. “We found everything exactly the reverse of what had been represented,” General Lee complained. “Not a single man of ’em is [capable] of constructing an oven.” Washington also recognized that his own five years as a callow regimental officer had left him, as he wrote, with “the want of experience to move upon a large scale”; like every other American commander, he knew little of cavalry, artillery, the mass movement of armies, or how to command a continental force. Still, service under British officers had deeply imprinted him with European orthodoxy, including strong preferences for offensive warfare, firepower, logistical competence, and rigid discipline. He was no brigand chieftain.

Even as he immersed himself in tactical minutiae, Washington recognized that a commander in chief must be a capable strategist; that brass spyglass had to focus on the horizon as much as on the local battlefield. War, he knew, was a struggle of political wills. Winning a war did not require winning every battle; the French war had proved that. Tactical developments often had little influence on strategic success. And Washington was—instinctively, brilliantly—a political general: in the month following his departure from Philadelphia, he wrote seven letters to Congress, acknowledging its superior authority while maneuvering to get what he needed. He used all the tools of a deft politico: flattery, blandishment, reason, contrition. More letters went to colonial governors. Congress had adopted the New England militia as a national force, to be augmented with regiments from other colonies, and he was aware that placing a southerner in command of this predominately northern army was a fragile experiment in continental unity.

The coming weeks and months required intimacy with his army, building the mystical bond between leader and led. Who were they? What did they believe? Why did they fight? How long would they fight? Washington would personify the army he commanded, no small irony given the despair and occasional contempt it caused him. That army would become both the fulcrum on which the fate of the nation balanced and the unifying element in the American body politic, a tie that bound together disparate interests of a republic struggling to be born. It was the indispensable institution, led by the indispensable man, and the coupling of a national army with its commander marked the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution. “Confusion and discord reigned in every department,” Washington wrote in late July. “However we mend every day, and I flatter myself that in a little time we shall work up these raw materials into good stuff.”

Raw indeed. “We were all young,” a twenty-one-year-old captain would write, “and in a manner unacquainted with human nature, quite novices in military matters, had everything to learn, and no one to instruct us who knew any better than ourselves.” If mostly literate, they were barely educated. “What I had learnt,” wrote Stephen Olney, a soldier from Rhode Island, “was mostly rong.” The camps were full of Old Testament names: Joshua, Jabez, Ezekiel, Amos, Caleb, Nathan, Nehemiah. Guided by that ancient text, many concluded that Gage was Pharaoh, if not the Antichrist, confronted by a Chosen People who in the past three months had killed or wounded fourteen hundred British Philistines. Some, of course, were here for the six and two-thirds dollars paid each month to privates, more money than a farm laborer might earn. Others were animated by an inchoate patriotism on behalf of a nation that did not yet exist. And more than one sought “to make a man of himself,” as was said of seventeen-year-old Jeremiah Greenman, also from Rhode Island.

“Discipline,” Washington had written in 1757, “is the soul of an army.” Certainly this army was still looking for its soul. American troops, one visitor claimed, were “as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier.” Each man lived in “a kennel of his own making.” No two companies drilled alike, and together on parade they were described as the finest body of men ever seen out of step. Their infractions were legion: singing on guard duty, voiding “excrement about the fields perniciously,” promiscuous shooting for the sake of noise, a tendency by privates to debate their officers, “unnecessary drum beating at night,” insolent “murmuring,” pilfering thirty bushels of cherries, thirty barrels of apples, and five hundred cabbages from one Chelsea farmer alone. When a small reward was offered for each British cannonball retrieved so that they could be reused, “every ball, as it fell, was surrounded with a great number of men to see who would get it first,” a lieutenant in Roxbury reported. Several lost their feet before the bounty was canceled.

The junior officers were not much better, notably those who used soldiers for personal farm labor, or falsified company returns to draw extra provisions, or pointed cocked pistols at their sergeants. Some officers, a Washington aide wrote in mid-August, were “not only ignorant and litigious but scandalously disobedient.” Many regiments elected their captains, lieutenants, and even lowly subalterns, often on the basis of civilian friendships, social rank, or political influence; the army was said to suffer from a “nightmare of liberty,” inimical to executive power. As for senior officers, few issues plagued Washington more than the endless jockeying for rank. Brigadier generals sulked and bickered all summer over seniority. When one threatened to resign in a snit, Lee wrote him in late July, “For God Almighty’s sake … for the sake of your country, of mankind, and let me add of your own reputation, discard such sentiments.” John Trumbull, a soldier, artist, and the son of Connecticut’s governor, wrote while serving in Roxbury, “Officers grumbling about rank and soldiers about pay, everyone thinking himself ill-used and imposed upon.”

For hours and days on end, Washington rode from Chelsea to Roxbury and back—inspecting, correcting, fuming—then returned to Vassall House to issue another raft of detailed, exhortatory commands. In the three months following his arrival in Cambridge, the commander in chief on five occasions, in general orders, condemned excessive drinking. Four times he demanded better hygiene. Thirteen times he pleaded for accurate returns from subordinate commanders to gauge the size and health of the army. Company rolls were to be called twice daily, and orders read aloud to ensure comprehension, if not obedience. No man was to appear on sentry duty who was “not perfectly sober and tolerably observing,” nor was anyone to appear in formation “without having on his stockings and shoes.” Fines were levied: a shilling for swearing, two shillings sixpence for unauthorized gunplay. Courts-martial dealt swift justice to erring officers. More than two dozen would be convicted in Washington’s first months of command, for offenses ranging from cowardice or other misbehavior at Bunker Hill—five officers found guilty—to defrauding men of their pay, embezzling provisions, and stabbing a subordinate. Most were cashiered in disgrace.

Washington’s conceptions of military justice had been shaped by his years under stern British command. In the spring of 1757 alone, he had approved floggings averaging six hundred lashes each—enough to cripple a man, or even kill him—and presided over courts-martial that imposed more than a dozen death sentences. Such draconian measures were impossible in an army saturated with democratic principles, and Congress stayed his hand by restricting floggings to thirty-nine stripes (soon to be increased to a hundred, at his insistence). If a bit less vindictive, the cat-o’-nine-tails still fell routinely across the backs of convicted men tied to a whipping post known as the “adjutant’s daughter.” “Saw two men whipt for stealing,” a corporal wrote. “O what a pernicious thing it is for a man to steal and cheat his feller nabors, and how provoking to God!” A deserter was not hanged or jailed but sentenced to clean latrines for a week while wearing a sign printed with his offense. A felonious sergeant was drummed from camp with the epithet “MUTINY” on his back.

“My greatest concern is to establish order, regularity & discipline,” Washington wrote Hancock. “My difficulties thicken every day.” In truth, an immensely wealthy man to the manner born, with scores of slaves to tend his business in his absence, could hardly comprehend the sacrifice made by most of his men in leaving their families, shops, and farms in high season. For that vital link between commander and commanded to be welded imperishably, Washington would have to know in his bones—and the men would have to know that he knew—what was risked and what was lost in serving at his side.

Many small, private tragedies, unseen by his spyglass, would play out over the coming months and years. “News of the death of my child,” Lieutenant Benjamin Craft told his journal on August 14. “I hope it will have a sanctifying effect on me and my poor wife. I hope God will enable us to bear all he shall lay upon us.” Many were lonely, and fretful for the families they had forsaken. Captain Nathan Peters had recently lost two young children when he left his surviving one-year-old and his pregnant wife, Lois, in Medfield. She was to run their saddlery while he went to war. “Pray write every opportunity, for I live very lonesome,” Lois wrote him that summer. “Without some money we cannot carry on the trade any longer, for we have laid out all the money we had for leather.… My heart aches for you and all our friends there.… Our corn looks well.”

Yet Washington complained in August of “an unaccountable kind of stupidity … among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the army, who are nearly of the kidney with the privates.” New England troops generally “are an exceeding dirty & nasty people,” he wrote in confidence to Lund Washington, his cousin and the manager of Mount Vernon. “I need not,” he added, “make myself enemies among them by this declaration.” In short, His Excellency faced “so many great and capital errors & abuses … that my life has been nothing else (since I came here) but one continued round of annoyance & fatigue.”

The army surely had far to travel, but so, too, did its commander.

Aggressive and even reckless, Washington longed for a decisive, bloody battle that would cause Britain to lose heart and sue for a political settlement. That appeared unlikely in Boston, where “it is almost impossible for us to get to them,” he wrote. Instead, the summer and fall would be limited to skirmishes, raids, and sniping. “Both armies kept squibbing at each other,” wrote the loyalist judge Peter Oliver, “but to little purpose.”

American whaleboats continued to bedevil Admiral Graves, who warned “all seafaring people” that rebels were trying to lure British ships into shoal water with “false lights.” After raiders burned part of the tall stone lighthouse on Little Brewster Island, a rocky speck eight miles east of Boston, Graves sent carpenters guarded by almost three dozen marines to make repairs and relight the beacon. At two a.m. on Monday, July 31, a British sergeant roused the detachment there with a strangled cry, “The whaleboats are coming!” More than three hundred baying Yankees in thirty-three boats, led by Major Benjamin Tupper of Rhode Island, pulled for the shoreline. Marines stumbled to the water’s edge, “though not without great confusion,” a British midshipman recorded, “many of them in liquor and totally unfit.”

Rebel musket balls peppered the wharf and the stone tower, killing a marine lieutenant and several others. A few workmen escaped by swimming toward warships in Lighthouse Channel, but most were captured, along with twenty-four marines. Raiders seized the lantern and lamp oil, then set fire to the outbuildings, the keeper’s house, and the tower staircase before rowing to the mainland to receive Washington’s praise for their “gallant and soldierlike behavior.” One patriot observed that “the once formidable navy of Britain [is] now degraded to a level with the corsairs of Barbary.” The British Army tended to agree. “The admiral [is] thought much to blame,” Gage’s aide reported, while General Burgoyne was even harsher in a letter to London: “It may be asked in England, ‘What is the admiral doing?’ … I can only say what he is not doing.” Graves seethed, and plotted his revenge against the rebels.

Yet squibbing would not winkle the British from Boston, nor provoke them to give battle. Moreover, Washington could hardly wage a protracted campaign, given that his army was short of virtually everything an army needed: camp kettles, entrenching tools, cartridge boxes, straw, bowls, spoons. “The carpenters will be obliged to stand still for want of nails,” a supply officer warned, while another advised in late July, “We are in want of soap for the army.” American troops—badly housed, badly clothed, and badly equipped—were at war with the world’s greatest commercial and military power, long experienced in expeditionary administration. As an ostensible national government, Congress had begun to improvise the means to fight that war, from printing money and raising regiments to collecting supplies. But the effort thus far seemed disjointed and often half-baked. Although Congress had appointed quartermaster and commissary chiefs, the jobs were neither defined nor supported, and other critical supply posts—notably for ordnance and clothing—would not be created for another eighteen months.

Simply feeding the regiments around Boston had become perilous. Commissary General Joseph Trumbull, a Harvard-educated merchant and another of the Connecticut governor’s sons, frantically tried to organize butchers, bakers, storekeepers, and purchasing agents. Coopers were needed to make barrels for preserved meat, and salt—increasingly scarce—was wanted to cure it. Forage, cash, and firewood also grew scarce; an inquiry found that much of the “beef” examined was actually horse. To feed the army through the following spring, Trumbull told Washington, he needed 25,000 barrels of flour, 13,000 barrels of salt beef and pork, 28,000 bushels of peas or beans, 11 tons of fresh beef three times a week, and 22,000 pints of milk, plus 200 barrels of beer or cider, every day, at a total cost of £200,000. By late September, as prices spiraled and supply agents rode to New York to beg for flour, Trumbull worried that by spring the army would face starvation and thus have to disband. “A commissary with twenty thousand gaping mouths open full upon him, and nothing to stop them with,” he wrote, “must depend on being devoured himself.”

But no shortage was as perilous as that discovered in early August. Washington’s staff calculated that an army of twenty thousand men, in thirty-nine regiments with a hundred cannons, required two thousand barrels of gunpowder—a hundred tons. Powder was the unum necessarium, as John Adams wrote, the one essential. Each pound contained roughly seven thousand grains, enough for a volley from forty-eight muskets. A big cannon throwing a 32-pound ball required eleven or twelve pounds of powder per shot; an 18-pounder used six or seven pounds. A survey taken soon after Washington’s arrival reported 303 barrels in his magazines, or fifteen tons—enough to stave off a British attack, but too little for cannonading. “We are so exceedingly destitute,” he told Hancock, “that our artillery will be of little use.”

Precisely how destitute became clear from the report laid before the war council that convened at Vassall House on Thursday, August 3. The earlier gunpowder estimate had erroneously included stocks used at Bunker Hill and in various prodigal skirmishes over the summer. Despite generous shipments to Cambridge from other colonies, the actual supply on hand, including the powder in all New England magazines, totaled 9,937 pounds, less than five tons, or enough for about nine rounds per soldier. Washington was gobsmacked. “The general was so struck that he did not utter a word for half an hour,” Brigadier General John Sullivan told the New Hampshire Committee of Safety. “Everyone else was equally surprised.” When he finally regained his tongue, Washington told his lieutenants that “our melancholy situation” must “be kept a profound secret.” This dire news, he added, was “inconceivable.”

More orders fluttered from the headquarters, along with desperate pleas. “Our situation in the article of powder is much more alarming than I had the most distant idea of,” Washington wrote Congress on Saturday. “The existence of the army, & the salvation of the country, depends upon something being done for our relief, both speedy and effectual.” Every soldier’s cartridge box was to be inspected each evening; some regiments levied one-shilling fines for each missing round. Civilians were asked “not to fire a gun at beast, bird, or mark without real necessity.” Even the camp reveille gun should be silenced. Desperate raids were contemplated, to Halifax or Bermuda. Pleading “the most distressing want,” Massachusetts requested powder from New York, which replied that it, too, was “afflicted and astonished,” with less than a hundred pounds for purchase.

A rebel schooner from Santo Domingo, in the West Indies, sailed up the Delaware River in late July under a false French flag with almost seven smuggled tons hidden in the hold beneath molasses barrels. Loaded into a half dozen wagons, the powder was promptly sent north with an armed escort. A second consignment of five tons soon followed, and by late August Washington had enough for twenty-five rounds per soldier, still a paltry amount. War could not be waged with an occasional smuggled windfall, yet not a single American powder mill existed when the rebellion began. Mills operating during the French war had fallen into disrepair or been converted to produce flour or snuff. Of particular concern was the shortage of saltpeter—potassium nitrate, typically collected from human and animal dung, and the only scarce ingredient in gunpowder. Identified as a strategic commodity in the medieval Book of Fires for the Burning of Enemies, saltpeter had been imported to Europe from India through Venice for centuries; imperial Britain bought almost two thousand tons a year. The saltpeter was kneaded with small portions of sulfur and charcoal, then pulverized, dusted, glazed, and dried to make gunpowder.

Saltpeter recipes soon appeared in American newspapers and pamphlets for patriots willing to collect the “effluvia of animal bodies” from outhouses, barns, stables, tobacco yards, and pigeon coops, preferably “moistened from time to time with urine.” Massachusetts offered £14 per hundred pounds, triple the price paid by Britain for Indian saltpeter. “I am determined never to have saltpeter out of my mind,” John Adams declared in October. “It must be had.”

Yet it would not be had in sufficient quantities to supply Washington’s magazines, which also lacked bayonets, good muskets, cartridge paper, bullet lead, and even shaped flints. In the next two years, at least 90 percent of American gunpowder, or the saltpeter to make it, would somehow have to come from abroad. For now, the shortage required “a very severe economy,” as one Washington aide wrote, curtailing tactical operations and imposing a quiescent status quo on the siege of Boston. By early fall, virtually all American cannons had fallen silent but for a single 9-pounder on Prospect Hill, fired occasionally in ornery defiance.

As Washington grappled with his powder problems, another shock jolted the American camp. On Tuesday, October 3, nine generals gathered for a war council with the commander in chief in a large front room at Vassall House. Outside the south windows, autumn colors tinted the elm trees, and the distant Charles glistened with a pewter hue. Wasting no time, Washington informed the council that an anonymous, encrypted “letter in characters,” addressed to a British major, had been intercepted in Newport, Rhode Island, and brought to the Cambridge headquarters. The original courier, a woman described by her former husband as “a very lusty woman much pitted with smallpox,” had been apprehended and bundled to Cambridge on the rump of a horse for interrogation.

Washington dramatically placed the pages on a table. An unbroken, nonsensical sequence of letters covered the first sheet for twenty-six lines, then spilled onto a second page. After the letter’s capture, he said, two copies had been sent for decipherment to trusted men with a knack for puzzles. This code substituted a different letter for each letter in the alphabet; it could be solved by identifying the most frequently used symbols in the cipher and assuming they represented the most common letters in English, starting with e, then t, then a, then o, and so forth. Both decryptions had been completed the previous night, and the solutions were identical.

Washington laid one of the translations before his lieutenants. The letter, more than 850 words long, provided details on American strength, artillery in New York, Bunker Hill casualties, troop numbers in Philadelphia, ammunition supplies, and recruiting. “Eighteen thousand brave & determined with Washington and Lee at their head are no contemptible enemy,” the writer had advised. “Remember I never deceived you.… A view to independence grows more and more general.… Make use of every precaution or I perish.”

From clues in the letter and a confession extracted from that lusty, pitted courier the secret author had been identified as Dr. Benjamin Church, recently appointed as the army’s surgeon general. He had been arrested, Washington said, and was confined to a room on the second floor of his hospital headquarters, just down the street from Vassall House. A search of his papers had yielded no incriminating evidence.

The next day, Dr. Church—forty-one, florid, and impeccably tailored—appeared under guard before the war council. He seemed an unlikely turncoat. A Mayflower descendant, Harvard-educated and medically trained in London, a writer of elegy and satire who could quote Virgil in Latin, he was an expert on smallpox inoculation, a physician for the public almshouse, and a radical firebrand who had performed the postmortem examinations of Boston Massacre victims. As a member of the Committee of Safety, he had supported Benedict Arnold’s attack on Ticonderoga and personally escorted Washington into Cambridge three months earlier. True, he had long had a reputation for high living—“much drove for money,” it was said—with a fine house in Boston, a country estate, and various mistresses.

Church quickly admitted authorship, but he insisted the letter was a ruse “to influence the enemy to propose immediate terms of accommodation.” His intent, if foolish and indiscreet, was to gull “the enemy with a strong idea of our strength” in order to forestall a British attack. Little information had been disclosed that Gage’s officers could not read in the newspapers. “I can honestly appeal to heaven for the purity of my intentions,” Church insisted. “I have served faithfully. I have never swerved from my duty through fear or temptation.” After questioning from each general, he was dismissed and marched back to confinement.

Not a man believed him, least of all Washington. “Good God!” John Adams wrote upon hearing the news. “What shall we say of human nature?” The infamous letter, Adams conceded, “is the oddest thing imaginable. There are so many lies in it, calculated to give the enemy a high idea of our power and importance.… Don’t let us abandon him for a traitor without certain evidence.” But what should be done? British statutes dating to the fourteenth century clearly defined treasonous offenses, including “imagining the death of our lord the king,” mounting a rebellion, or seducing the queen. Yet the articles of war recently adopted in Philadelphia failed to address espionage or treason. Uncertain about how best to proceed, Congress sacked Church as surgeon general on October 14 and instructed Massachusetts to decide his fate.

At ten a.m. on Friday, October 27, Church was bundled into a chaise by the county sheriff and escorted by twenty soldiers with fife and drum three miles to the Watertown meetinghouse. Members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, of which Church was an elected delegate, filled many of the hundred boxes on the ground floor. Spectators packed an upstairs gallery, and armed guards stood at each exit. Summoned by the doorkeeper, Church strode down the aisle to a wooden bar below the pulpit. The Speaker, James Warren, read a dispatch from Washington describing the war council’s conclusion that Church was guilty of “holding a criminal correspondence with the enemy.” The infamous letter was produced, and the decryption read.

For more than an hour, Church parried the accusations, invoking the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, and his pure heart. He claimed that he had refused a guinea a day to betray the American cause and that he had merely intended to confuse, if not dupe, the British. The letter was “innocently intended, however indiscreetly executed,” just a “piece of artifice,” ultimately intended for his brother-in-law, a loyalist newspaper publisher. And how, he asked, could he have conducted a criminal correspondence if the letter had not reached the British? General Greene, watching from the gallery, wrote his wife that night, “With art and ingenuity … he veiled the villainy of his conduct and by implication transformed vice into virtue.” Church “appeared spotless as an angel of light,” William Tudor, the judge advocate general, told John Adams.

The assembly broke for a late lunch. After a chicken wing and a mug of flip at Coolidge’s Tavern, Church resumed his defense at three-thirty p.m. “Is it criminal, sir, to alarm them with a parade of our strength and preparation?” he asked. “If this is the work of an enemy, where are we to look for a friend?” Invoking his long service to the cause, he added, “Weigh the labors of an active life against the indiscretion of an hour.… To your wisdom, gentlemen, to your justice, to your tenderness, I cheerfully submit my fate.”

That fate was sealed. The House promptly expelled him for what James Warren called “the wickedness of his heart.” Under orders from Congress, Washington sent him with a nine-man prisoner escort to Connecticut, where Church complained of being confined in a “close, dark, and noisome cell”; Congress specifically denied him “the use of pen, ink, and paper.” Not for more than 150 years, after scholars sifted through General Gage’s private papers, would Church’s guilt be irrefutably confirmed: he had been a British spy at least since early 1775, for cash, and had likely provided information about hidden weapons in Concord, among other rebel secrets.

During Church’s lifetime, he was briefly paroled after several physicians reported that asthmatic conditions in the Connecticut dungeon endangered his health. But angry rioters sacked his Boston house and forced him back to jail for his own protection; efforts to exchange him for American prisoners held by the British provoked more riots. His wife and children made their way to London, where the king gave her a £150 pension. In 1778, Church would finally be allowed to go into exile, but the sloop carrying him to Martinique vanished without a trace. He was never heard from again, although his grieving father, a Boston deacon, refused to give up hope to his own dying day. In 1780, he bequeathed £5 and a shelf of books to his son Benjamin, “whether living or dead, God only knows.”

All through the fall, bored, mischievous, and gullible American soldiers spread fantastic rumors: that the British had been ordered back to England, that a French fleet had put to sea on America’s behalf, that the Spanish had besieged Gibraltar, that eight German generals—or three German princes—would soon arrive with an ammunition ship to help Washington, that Holland had called in debts and forced Britain to declare bankruptcy. It was said on the best authority that a London mob had destroyed the Parliament building and chased Lord North to France.

Autumn sickness crept through the camps, and although the American force exceeded 20,000 by early November, those present and fit for duty remained below 14,000. The officer corps now comprised 60 colonels and lieutenant colonels, 30 majors, 290 captains, 558 lieutenants, and 65 ensigns. Washington’s host also included 21 chaplains, 31 surgeons, 1,238 sergeants, and 690 drummers and fifers. All games of chance, including pitch and hustle, which involved a halfpence coin, were forbidden by his order, so to build morale, wrestling matches were staged in late October between the brigades on Winter and Prospect Hills. Men foraged for chestnuts, apples, and turnips; they sang camp songs accompanied by German flutes. Weather forecasters studied the “upper side of the moon” for clues, though no one doubted that winter was coming. The army would need ten thousand cords of firewood in the next few months, and Washington was already fretting over “a most mortifying scarcity” that hindered recruiting and could force his regiments to disperse or risk freezing.

Every day British fire drubbed the bivouacs, sometimes forty or fifty cannonballs for each American shot. “At about 9 a.m. we flung two 18-lb. balls into Boston from the lower fort, just to let them know where to find us, for which the enemy returned 90 shots,” a soldier told his diary in October. A comrade wrote of the same incident, “One man had his arm shot off there and two cows killed. Nothing new.” Local newspapers carried dozens of reward offers for deserters, including “one Jonathan Hantley, a well-set fellow, about five feet nine inches in height … talks with a brogue, pretends to doctor, professes to have great skill in curing cancers”; and Simeon Smith, “about 5 feet 4 inches high, had on a blue coat and black vest … his voice in the hermaphrodite fashion”; and “Matthias Smith, a small smart fellow, is apt to say, ‘I swear, I swear!’ and between his words will spit smart.”

For more than twenty years Washington had doubted that amateur citizen soldiers could form what he called “a respectable army,” capable of defeating trained, disciplined professionals. Nothing he had seen in Cambridge changed his mind. Militiamen called to arms for a few weeks or months “will never answer your expectations,” he had once written. “No dependence is to be placed upon them. They are obstinate and perverse.” With most enlistments due to expire in December and January, Washington told Hancock on October 30 that perhaps half of all the junior officers were likely to leave the army and “I fear will communicate the infection” to the enlisted ranks. “I confess,” he added, “I have great anxieties upon the subject.”

All the more reason to strike the British before winter arrived and his army drifted away. Yet his wish for “a speedy finish of the dispute” found little support among his generals. A proposed amphibious assault on Boston, supported by artillery and a frontal attack at the Neck, was unanimously rejected by his war council for fear that Boston would share Charlestown’s charred fate. Washington suggested another plan and it, too, was rejected, to a man, on October 18. “Too great a risk,” General Lee advised. “Not practicable under all circumstances,” General Greene added.

He had little recourse but to husband his gunpowder, stockpile firewood, and launch an occasional raid or sniping sortie with the ten companies of riflemen Congress had sent from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Unlike muskets, rifle barrels were grooved to spin bullets for greater stability and accuracy. A capable marksman might hit a bull’s-eye at two hundred yards, although the weapon was slower to load; the projectile had to be wrapped in a greased linen patch and painstakingly “wanged” down the tighter bore. Moreover, no bayonet had yet been invented that would fit over a rifle muzzle. Riflemen were lethal and exotic, happily demonstrating their sharpshooting prowess while firing from their backs, or while running, or with trusting comrades holding targets between their knees. Many wore fringed hunting shirts, moccasins, and even Indian paint. Throngs of admiring civilians turned out to cheer them as the long-striding companies made their way toward Cambridge. They also proved maddening to their commanders, their boorish or insubordinate behavior sometimes leading to arrests and shackles. “Washington has said he wished they had never come,” General Ward told John Adams on October 30. Lee called them “damned riff-raff—dirty, mutinous, and disaffected.” Still, a Washington aide reported that rifle fire so unnerved the British “that nothing is to be seen over the breastwork but a hat.” A Yankee newspaper warned, “General Gage, take care of your nose.”

But General Gage had gone, and he took his nose with him. In late September, Scarborough arrived in Boston with orders summoning Gage home, a decision made soon after the news of Bunker Hill reached London. The king had insisted that the general’s feelings be spared by pretending that he was being recalled to plan the 1776 campaign. Gage packed his personal papers in white pine boxes and, after a flurry of salutes, sailed aboard the transport Pallas at nine p.m. on October 11. He was soon forgotten, both in America and in England, though he continued to draw a salary as the Crown’s governor of Massachusetts. Horace Walpole joked that he might be hanged for the errors of his masters.

William Howe moved into Province House as the new “general and commander-in-chief of all His Majesty’s forces within the colonies laying on the Atlantic Ocean from Nova Scotia to West Florida inclusive, etc., etc., etc.” Major General Howe’s sentiments on the occasion could not be discerned, for he remained relentlessly taciturn—“never wastes a monosyllable,” Walpole quipped—the better to hide his indecision. Now forty-six and thickset, with bulging eyes and a heavy brow, he bore an uncanny resemblance to his monarch, perhaps because his mother was widely rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of George I. His father, a viscount and the governor of Barbados, had died young in 1735. William Howe’s eldest brother, George, deemed “the best officer in the British Army,” had also died young, from a French bullet at Fort Carillon in 1758; in gratitude, Massachusetts paid £250 for a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. A second brother, Richard, succeeded to the viscount’s title and was now an admiral. William emerged belaureled from the French war, not least for his celebrated climb up a St. Lawrence River bluff to reach the Plains of Abraham—“laying hold of stumps and boughs of trees,” a witness reported—during Britain’s capture of Quebec. Family lore held that he returned to England clad in buckskin and moccasins, to be known thereafter to his siblings as “the Savage.”

Elected to Parliament from Nottingham, the Savage advocated restraint in colonial policy and vowed never to take up arms against his American kinsmen—even as he privately advised Lords North and Dartmouth that he was willing to do precisely that. When orders came to report to Boston, he told a constituent that he “could not refuse without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serving my country in a day of distress.” He added assurances that “the insurgents are very few in comparison to the whole of the people.” Although he rarely spoke, was often wrong when he did, and seemed averse to advice, the manly if morose Howe was a welcome change within the ranks after Old Woman Gage. “He is much beloved by the whole army,” a captain wrote. “They feel a confidence in him.”

Howe now had some eleven thousand mouths to feed, and little to feed them. “What in God’s name are ye all about in England?” an officer wrote in a letter published at home. “Have you forgot us?” Hospitals remained jammed with men suffering from wounds, scurvy, dysentery, and other maladies. “I have eat fresh meat but three times in six weeks,” a lieutenant wrote. Rebel whaleboats chased loyalist fishing smacks from coastal waters, severing supplies of cod, haddock, and terrapin. Bad mutton cost a shilling a pound; a skinny goose, twenty shillings. Salt meat was the inevitable staple, though said to be “as hard as wood, as lean as carrion, and as rusty as the devil.” General Percy reportedly killed and roasted a foal for his table, while one Winifried McCowen, a camp retainer, took a hundred lashes across her back for stealing and butchering the town bull. A Boston man wrote that he had been “invited by two gentlemen to dine upon rats.”

With each passing day, the blockade grew more oppressive. “They are burrowing like rabbits all around us,” wrote Captain Glanville Evelyn, now commanding a light infantry company encamped in leaky tents on Bunker Hill. “There’s nothing reconciles being shot at … so much as being paid for it.” General Burgoyne was in high dudgeon. “Our present situation is a consummation of inertness and disgrace,” he wrote. “Driven from one hill, you will see the enemy continually retrenched upon the next.… Could we at last penetrate ten miles, perhaps we should not attain a single sheep or an ounce of flour, for they remove every article of provisions as they go.” By Howe’s calculations, to move 32 regiments beyond Boston would require 3,662 horses—plus nearly 50 tons of hay and oats daily to feed them—and 540 wagons. That was almost 3,000 horses and 500 wagons more than he had.

Shifting the army by sea from Boston to New York had been discussed since midsummer. Burgoyne listed eight good reasons to make the move, including the large trove of loyalists there, access to food and forage on Long Island, and control of the Hudson valley corridor to Canada. But permission from London had been late in arriving, as usual, and now the season was too far advanced for a safe passage, given stormy weather, rebel pirates, and the lack of a single secure harbor between Boston and New York. Howe did some more arithmetic: unless five thousand regulars were left to hold Boston, complementing the twelve thousand needed in New York, at least a thousand Crown officials and loyalists would also have to be transported, along with £300,000 in goods, which, Burgoyne urged, “ought on no account to be left to the enemy.” Such an exodus would require far more British shipping than was currently available. Inevitably they would have to winter in Boston, as one private wrote, “like birds in a cage.”

Badly fed birds, at that. “Starve them out” had been a Yankee rallying cry since April. Britain had never maintained a large army several thousand miles from home without buying local food and fodder; living off the land by plunder was generally impossible for armies in the eighteenth century, even when the land was accessible. To sustain the fleet, in the coming months the Navy and Victualling Boards would hire far more transport tonnage than in the last French war, and that did not include ships needed by the Treasury and Ordnance Board bureaucracies responsible for feeding army troops abroad. As Cardinal Richelieu, the great French statesman during the Thirty Years’ War, had warned, “History knows many more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies.”

British supply contractors were supposed to stockpile at least a six-month food reserve in Boston, yet when Howe took command, the larder held less than a thirty-day supply, including just two dozen bushels of peas. Five storeships from England and Ireland arrived, but most of the 5,200 barrels of flour aboard proved rancid. Regulars composed an impious parody: “Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our not eating it.”

Strongboxes stuffed with cash were shipped from London to Boston aboard Centurion, Greyhound, and other warships; by late fall, more than £300,000 had been requisitioned. But rebels often thwarted British efforts to buy supplies in New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere. Moreover, transaction fees had risen to a staggering 23 percent of the sums spent. Shortages of fodder required slaughtering milk cows in Boston for meat; more than three dozen vessels sailed to Quebec and the Bay of Fundy in search of hay and oats, an unfortunate, if necessary, use of precious shipping. In mid-November, Howe sent London another set of beautiful charts, with exquisite clerical calligraphy and precise double lines drawn in red pencil to separate the columns, all to demonstrate that “there are not provisions for the army in store to serve longer than the beginning of March 1776.” Lieutenant William Feilding of the British marines wrote home, “Nothing but a desire of scouring the insolent rebels of our country keeps up the soldiers’ spirit.”

Alcohol helped, too. American rum was deemed “new and unwholesome,” so in September the British government signed an initial contract for 100,000 gallons of West Indies rum to be delivered to the army, complementing 375,000 gallons of porter to help combat scurvy. By spring a half million gallons of rum would be purchased for the Boston garrison at three to five shillings a gallon, the largest single item of expense among government provisions; ten times more was spent on rum than on medicines. The Treasury Board also saw to it that British officials in America received hydrometers—each composed of a glass cylinder, a thermometer, and various weights carefully marked for Jamaica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and other sources of West Indies rum—along with three pages of instructions on how to test each lot to ensure that contractors delivered “the usual and proper proof.” Rum had long been a reward for difficult military duty; Howe quietly made it part of the regular ration, issued at a daily rate of a quart for every six men.

Four small British warships and a storeship rounded the Casco Bay headland off Falmouth, Maine, on the mild, breezy morning of Monday, October 16. Nearly two thousand souls lived in remote Falmouth, a hundred miles upcoast from Boston, the men scratching out a living as fishermen, millers, and timberjacks. For more than half a century, Royal Navy agents had routinely come to collect enormous white pines, some of them three feet in diameter and blazed with the king’s proprietary broad-arrow insignia. After felling, the great sticks were twitched into the water by twenty yokes of oxen, then lashed into rafts or winched onto ships and hauled across the Atlantic to Portsmouth and other shipyards to be shaped and stepped as the towering masts on the king’s biggest men-of-war. To the lament of British shipwrights, that mast trade all but ended with the gunplay at Lexington. Felled timber had been hidden upriver from Falmouth, and after armed rebels twice thwarted British efforts to secure the masts, Royal Navy officers threatened “to beat the town down about their ears.”

As the five vessels carefully warped into the harbor the following afternoon, a rumor spread that the intruders simply intended to rustle livestock along the bay. Militiamen hurried off to shoo the flocks and herds to safety. That delusion vanished at four p.m., when a British naval officer with a marine escort rowed to the King Street dock, marched to the crowded town hall in Greele’s Lane, and with a flourish delivered a written ultimatum, “full of bad English and worse spelling,” one witness complained. Read aloud twice by a local lawyer who was said to have “a tremor in his voice,” the decree warned that in the name of “the best of sovereigns … you have been guilty of the most unpardonable rebellion.” The flotilla had orders to administer “a just punishment”: Falmouth was given two hours to evacuate “the human species out of the said town.” “Every heart,” a clergyman wrote, “was seized with terror, every countenance changed color, and a profound silence ensued.” A three-man delegation rowed out to Canceaux, an eight-gun former merchantman, to beg mercy of Lieutenant Henry Mowat, the flotilla commander.

Few sailors knew the upper New England coast better than Mowat, a forty-one-year-old Scot who for more than a decade had surveyed every cove, island, and inlet for Admiralty charts. One senior officer described him as “the most useful person perhaps in America for the service we are engaged in.” Mowat held a grudge against Maine militiamen, who had briefly taken him prisoner during a skirmish over the contested masts in Falmouth five months earlier. But his instructions from Admiral Graves went far beyond personal revenge: Graves had been ordered by Lord Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, to “show the rebels the weight of an English fleet.… You may be blamed for doing little but can never be censured for doing too much.” Graves had taken the hint. In early October, he’d told Mowat to “burn, destroy, and lay waste” nine maritime towns northeast of Boston.

So far the chastisement had gone badly. Gales nearly wrecked two of Mowat’s ships off Gloucester. Houses in a couple of targeted towns were judged by his gunnery experts to be too scattered to be worth his limited supply of incendiary carcasses. Contrary winds kept the flotilla from reaching Machias, another town two hundred miles up the coast, where a British midshipman and several sailors had been killed in a bloody scrap in June. Falmouth would have to do.

The town “had not the least right to expect any lenity,” Mowat told the emissaries. His orders were unequivocal. But because of “the known humanity of the British nation,” he would hold his fire if by eight a.m. all small arms, ammunition, and the five carriage guns known to be in Falmouth were surrendered.

All night long the townsfolk debated, fretted, wailed, and debated some more. Horse and ox teams plodded through Queen, Fish, and Middle Streets, hauling away furniture, shop goods, and the infirm. Hothead militiamen vowed to incinerate the town themselves if Falmouth complied with Mowat’s demand. A few old muskets were sculled out to the Canceaux to buy time, but at dawn the people of Falmouth screwed up their courage and sent another delegation to inform Mowat that they had “resolved by no means to deliver up the cannon and other arms.” “Perceiving women and children still in the town,” Mowat later told Graves, “I made it forty minutes after nine before the signal was hoisted.”

A red flag appeared on Canceaux’s main topgallant masthead. Tongues of smoke and flame abruptly licked from the ships’ gun decks. “The firing began from all the vessels,” a witness later wrote, “a horrible shower of balls from three to nine pounds weight, bombs, carcasses, live shells, grapeshot, and musketballs”—eventually more than three thousand projectiles. The crash of shattered glass and splintered wood echoed along the waterfront, where a dozen merchant coasters also came under bombardment. For three hours fires blazed up only to be swatted out by homeowners and shopkeepers, although some militiamen looted their neighbors while pretending to fight fires. “The oxen, terrified at the smoke and report of the guns, ran with precipitation over the rocks, dashing everything to pieces,” another resident wrote.

“At noon,” Canceaux’s log recorded, “the fire began to be general both in the town and vessels, but being calm the fire did not spread as wished for.” Concussion and recoil also fractured several gun carriages on the British ships—the sloop Spitfire was “much shattered,” Mowat reported—so thirty marines and sailors went ashore to toss torches through windows and doorways. The breeze picked up at two p.m., and by late afternoon Falmouth “presented a broad sheet of flame” from Parsons Lane to Fore Street.

Britain had murdered another Yankee town. The Essex Gazette tallied 416 buildings destroyed, including 136 houses, the Episcopal church, various barns, the meetinghouse, the customs house, the library, and the new courthouse. Many of the hundred structures still standing were thoroughly ventilated by balls and shells, and the three-day rain that began at ten p.m. ruined furnishings that had failed to burn. Mowat counted eleven American vessels sunk or burned, four others captured, and a distillery, wharves, and warehouses “all laid into ashes.” With his ammunition nearly spent and the flotilla badly in need of repairs, he anchored overnight in ten fathoms, then sailed for Boston. The remaining eight towns on Admiral Graves’s chastisement list would be spared.

The admiral claimed to have administered “a severe stroke to the rebels,” but he soon took a stroke himself when a letter from London arrived relieving him of command. Graves had done both too little and too much in six months of war; the Admiralty had grown weary of his excuses and the army’s complaints. He would be missed by no one except perhaps his nephews. As an act of vengeance, the razing of Falmouth may have brought brief satisfaction, but it made little sense tactically or strategically. While nearly two thousand residents sought shelter at the beginning of a Maine winter, couriers carried the news to the outside world. “It cannot be true,” the Gentleman’s Magazine opined when reports reached London. The French foreign minister called the attack “absurd as well as barbaric.” In Cambridge, General Lee denounced “the tragedy acted by these hell hounds of an execrable ministry” and recommended seizing British hostages in New York. “This is savage and barbarous,” James Warren wrote John Adams. “What more can we want to justify any step to take, kill, and destroy?”

The wolf had risen in the heart. Enraged and unified, Americans demanded revenge. Coastal towns fortified themselves and organized early warning systems with beacons and express riders. The Yale College library became an armory. Some colonial governments had already authorized privateers—merchantmen converted into warships—to attack enemy shipping, and Congress would soon follow suit. Such patriot marauders collected from a third to the entire value of a captured ship, with severe consequences in the coming years for several thousand British vessels.

Few were angrier than General Washington. He rejected Falmouth’s plea for ammunition and men—the commander in chief could hardly disperse his modest army among coastal enclaves—but in a pale fury he denounced British “cruelty and barbarity.” More clearly than ever he saw the war as a moral crusade, a death struggle between good and evil. In general orders to the troops he fulminated against “a brutal, savage enemy.” Many Americans now agreed with the sentiment published in the New-England Chronicle a month after Falmouth’s immolation: “We expect soon to break off all kinds of connections with Britain, and form into a grand republic of the American colonies.”

5.
I Shall Try to Retard the Evil Hour

INTO CANADA, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1775

Some 230 miles northwest of Boston, a second siege now threatened Britain’s hold on Canada. For almost a month, more than a thousand American troops had surrounded Fort St. Johns, a dank compound twenty miles below Montreal on the swampy western bank of the Richelieu River in what one regular called “the most unhealthy spot in inhabited Canada.” A stockade and a dry moat lined with sharpened stakes enclosed a pair of earthen redoubts, two hundred yards apart and connected by a muddy trench. A small stone barracks, a bakery, a powder magazine, and several log buildings chinked with moss stood in the southern redoubt. Thirty cannons crowned the ramparts and poked through sodded embrasures, spitting iron balls whenever the rebels approached or grew too impertinent with their own artillery. By mid-October, seven hundred people were trapped at St. Johns, among them most of the British troops in Canada—drawn from the 26th Foot and the 7th Foot, known as the Royal Fusiliers—as well as most of the Royal Artillery’s gunners, eighty women and children, and more than seventy Canadian volunteers. Sentries cried, “Shot!” whenever they spotted smoke and flame from a rebel battery, and hundreds fell on their faces in the mud as the ball whizzed overhead or splatted home, somewhere.

The regulars still wore summer uniforms and suffered from the cold: the first hard frost had set on September 30, followed by eight consecutive days of rain. Some ripped the skirts from their coats to wrap around their feet. The garrison now lived on half-rations and shared a total of twenty blankets, with no bedding or straw for warmth. Only a shallow house cellar in the northern redoubt offered any shelter belowground, and it was crammed with the sick and the groaning wounded. Major Charles Preston, the fort’s dimple-chinned commandant, had sent four couriers to plead for help in Montreal. Each slipped from the fort at night and scuttled through the dense Richelieu thickets. But no reply had been heard—“not a syllable,” as Preston archly noted—since an order had arrived from the high command in early September to “defend St. Johns to the last extremity.”

At one p.m. on Saturday, October 14, many cries of “Shot!” were heard when the rebels opened a new battery with two 12-pounders and two 4-pounders barely three hundred yards away on the river’s eastern shore. One cannonball ricocheted from a chimney, demolishing the house and killing a lieutenant; another detonated a barrel of gunpowder in an orange fireball, killing another man and wounding three. Balls battered the fort’s gate and clipped its parapet. A 13-inch shell from a rebel mortar called Old Sow punched through the barracks roof, blowing out windows while killing two more and wounding five. “The hottest fire this day that hath been done here,” an officer told his diary.

The next day was just as hot: 140 rebel rounds bombarded the fort on Sunday, perforating buildings and men. A Canadian cook lost both legs. A twelve-gun British schooner, the Royal Savage, was moored between the redoubts along the western riverbank, although the crew fled to the fort after complaining that it was “impossible to sleep on board without being amphibious.” Rebel gunners now took aim at Royal Savage with heated balls, punching nine holes in the hull and three through the mainmast, then demolishing the sternpost holding the rudder. “The schooner sunk up to her ports … and her colors which lay in the hold were scorched,” a British lieutenant, John André, wrote in his journal. She soon sank with a gurgle into the Richelieu mud.

Major Preston and most of his men remained defiant, despite the paltry daily ration of roots and salt pork, despite the awful smells seeping from the cellar hospital, despite the rebel riflemen who crept close at dusk for a shot at anyone careless enough to show his silhouette on the rampart. British ammunition stocks dwindled, but gunners still sought out rebel batteries, smashing the hemlocks and the balm of Gilead trees around the American positions north and west of the fort. Yet without prompt relief—whether from Montreal, London, or heaven—few doubted that the last extremity had drawn near. “I am still alive,” wrote one of the besieged in late October, “but the will to live diminishes within me.”

For nearly a century, Americans had seen Canada as a blood enemy. New Englanders and New Yorkers especially never forgave the atrocities committed by French raiders and their Indian confederates at Deerfield, Schenectady, Fort William Henry, and other frontier settlements. Catholic Quebec was seen as a citadel of popery and tyranny. The French, as a Rhode Island pastor proclaimed in 1759, were children of the “scarlet whore, the mother of harlots.”

Britain’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War and its acquisition of New France in 1763—known in Quebec as “the Conquest”—gladdened American hearts. Many French Canadians decamped for France. Priests lost the right to collect tithes and the benefit of an established state religion. A small commercial class of English merchants, friendly to American traders, took root. The Canadian population—under a hundred thousand, less than New Jersey—was still largely rural, illiterate, dependent on farming and fur, and essentially feudal. Most were French-Canadian habitants, or peasants, now known as “new subjects,” since their allegiance to the British Crown was barely a decade old and deeply suspect. Many secretly hoped that France would win back what had been lost or that the “Londoners”—Englishmen—would tire of the weather and go home. Largely descended from Norman colonists sent to the New World by Louis XIV, the habitants were described by an eighteenth-century author as “loud, boastful, mendacious, obliging, civil, and honest.” A few thousand “old subjects”—Anglo merchants and Crown officials—congregated in Montreal and Quebec City. Nova Scotia and the maritime precincts remained wild, isolated, and sparsely peopled.

As tensions with Britain escalated, many Americans—Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams among them—considered Canada a natural component of a united North America. The First Continental Congress in October 1774 sent Canadians an open letter, at once beckoning and sinister: “You have been conquered into liberty.… You are a small people, compared to those who with open arms invite you into fellowship.” Canadians faced a choice between having “all the rest of North America your unalterable friends, or your inveterate enemies.”

The Quebec Act, which took effect in May 1775, infuriated the Americans and altered the political calculus. Canada would be ruled not by an elected assembly, but by a royal governor and his council, a harbinger, in American eyes, of British tyranny across the continent. Even more provocative were the provisions extending Quebec’s boundaries south and west, into the rich lands beyond the Appalachians for which American colonists had fought both Indians and the French, and the recognition of the Roman Catholic Church’s status in Canada, including the right of Catholics to hold office and citizenship, to again levy parish tithes, to serve in the army, and to retain French civil law. These provisions riled American expansionists—fifty thousand of whom now lived west of the mountains—and revived fears of what one chaplain described as “this vast extended country, which has been for ages the dwelling of Satan.” Catholic hordes—likened to a mythical beast found in the Book of Revelation, “drunk with the wine of her fornications”—could well descend on Protestant America. It was said that hundreds of pairs of snowshoes had been readied, should Canadian legions be commanded to march southward.

War in Massachusetts, and the American capture of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, brought matters to a head. Congress dithered, initially proposing to return the two forts rather than end any chance of reconciliation with Britain; then decided to keep them; then dithered some more over whether to preemptively attack Quebec when it became clear that Canada was unlikely to send delegates to Philadelphia despite an invitation to “the oppressed inhabitants” to make common cause as “fellow sufferers.” The debate raged for weeks. Even Washington, who had qualms about opening another front, saw utility in capturing Canadian staging grounds before the reinforced British could descend on New York and New England. Others saw a chance to seize the Canadian granary and fur trade, to forestall attacks by Britain’s potential Indian allies, and to preclude the need to rebuild Ticonderoga and other frontier defenses. Britain reportedly had fewer than seven hundred regulars scattered across Quebec; two of the four regiments posted there had been sent to Boston in 1774 at Gage’s request. Canada conceivably could be captured and converted into the fourteenth American province with fewer than two thousand troops in a quick, cheap campaign. Skeptics argued that an invasion would convert Americans into aggressors, disperse scarce military resources, and alienate both American moderates and British supporters of the colonial cause. Some recalled that during the last war, more than a million British colonists and regulars had needed six years, several of them disastrous, to subdue less than seventy thousand Canadians and their French allies.

In late June, Congress finally ordered Major General Philip Schuyler, a well-born New Yorker, to launch preemptive attacks to prevent Britain from seizing Lake Champlain. He was authorized to “take possession of St. Johns, Montreal, and any other parts of the country” if “practicable” and if the intrusion “will not be disagreeable to the Canadians.” Under the guise of promoting continental “peace and security”—Congress promised to “adopt them into our union as a sister colony”—Canada was to be obliterated as a military and political threat. Most Canadians were expected to welcome the incursion, a fantasy not unlike that harbored by Britain about the Americans. This would be the first, but hardly the last, American invasion of another land under the pretext of bettering life for the invaded.

Congress had denounced Catholics for “impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.” Now it found “the Protestant and Catholic colonies to be strongly linked” by their common antipathy to British oppression. In a gesture of tolerance and perhaps to forestall charges of hypocrisy, Congress also acknowledged that Catholics deserved “liberty of conscience.” If nothing else, the Canadian gambit caused Americans to contemplate the practical merits of inclusion, moderation, and religious freedom. The Northern Army, as the invasion host was named, was to be a liberating force, not a vengeful one.

For two months little had gone right in the campaign. The Northern Army comprised twelve hundred ill-trained, ill-equipped, insubordinate troops, many without decent firelocks or gunsmiths at hand to fix them. When General Schuyler reached Ticonderoga at ten p.m. on a July evening, the lone sentinel tried unsuccessfully to waken the watch and the rest of the garrison. “With a penknife only,” Schuyler wrote Washington, “I could … have set fire to the blockhouse, destroyed the stores, and starved the people here.” Three weeks later, having advanced not a step farther north, he reported that he had less than a ton of gunpowder, no carriages to move his field guns, and little food. His men, scattered along the Hudson valley, seemed “much inclined to a seditious and mutinous temper.” Carpenters building flat-bottomed bateaux to cross Lake Champlain lacked timber, nails, pitch, and cordage. When Schuyler requested reinforcements, the New York Committee of Safety told him, “Our troops can be of no service to you. They have no arms, clothes, blankets, or ammunition; the officers no commissions; our treasury no money.”

Tall, thin, and florid, with kinky hair and a raspy voice, Philip Schuyler was among America’s wealthiest and most accomplished men. The scion of émigré Dutch land barons, he owned twenty thousand acres from New York to Detroit, including a brick mansion on a ridge above Albany with a view of the Catskills and hand-painted wallpaper depicting romantic Roman ruins. His country seat on Fish Creek in Saratoga abutted sawmills and a flax plantation that spun linen. He spoke French and Mohawk, understood lumber markets, mathematics, boat-building, slave owning, navigation, hemp cultivation, and, from service in the last war, military logistics. British officers had praised his “zeal, punctuality, and strict honesty.” The body of his young friend Lord George Howe, slain by the French at Ticonderoga, lay in the Schuyler family vault for years before permanent burial in a lead casket beneath St. Peter’s chancel in Albany. As a delegate to Congress, Schuyler sat with Washington on a committee to collect ammunition and war matériel, then rode north with him from Philadelphia after both received their general’s commissions. Among other services rendered the Northern Army, Schuyler helped persuade Iroquois warriors to renounce their traditional allegiance to Britain and to remain neutral, at least for now, in what he described—during pipe-smoking negotiations at Cartwright’s Tavern in Albany—as “a family quarrel.” To impress the Indians with American strength, he had ordered troops to march in circles through the town, magnifying their numbers.

For all his virtues, Schuyler was wholly unfit to command a field army in the wilderness. His urbane, patrician mien could seem “haughty and overbearing,” as one chaplain wrote, especially to New Englanders who habitually disliked the New York Dutch because of border disputes and ethnic frictions. Almost from the start of the campaign, the general was accused of being a secret Tory and of sabotaging the Canadian expedition. Not yet forty-two, he also suffered from “a barbarous complication of disorders,” including gout, malaria, and rheumatic afflictions. His clinical bulletins to Washington routinely described “a very severe fit of the ague,” or “a copious scorbutic eruption,” or “a copious discharge from an internal impostume in my breast.” He was not a well man.

Alarming reports in late August of British vessels at St. Johns preparing to sortie onto Lake Champlain forced the Americans into motion. Brigadier General Richard Montgomery set out from Ticonderoga on August 31 with the twelve hundred men and four 12-pounders aboard a schooner, a sloop, and a mismatched flotilla of bateaux, row galleys, and canoes. He urged the ailing Schuyler, his superior, to “follow us in a whaleboat.… It will give the men great confidence in your spirit and activity.” Despite the “inflexible severity of my disorders,” Schuyler subsequently headed north in early September with a stack of proclamations in French to be scattered across Quebec: “We cannot doubt that you are pleased that the Grand Congress have ordered an army into Canada.” From Cambridge, Washington wrote, “I trust you will have a feeble enemy to contend with and a whole province on your side.”

Wishing did not make it so. Reunited on the upper reaches of Lake Champlain, Schuyler and Montgomery led their men down the Richelieu, which flowed north from the lake for almost eighty miles to the St. Lawrence River. The invaders disembarked on September 6 just short of Fort St. Johns, about a third of the distance to the St. Lawrence, then struggled toward the compound in “a tangled way” for a quarter mile through a swampy woodland, only to be ambushed by Indians and regulars in a confused melee that left nine Americans dead and as many wounded.

For more than a week, the invasion stalled. Priests in Montreal celebrated Canada’s deliverance in a thanksgiving mass with a jubilant Te Deum. Another American advance on the fort turned to fiasco when strange noises spooked the men, who “ran like sheep,” in Montgomery’s contemptuous phrase. With difficulty and a threat of bayonets, they were restrained from pushing off in the boats and abandoning their officers on the shoreline. “Such a set of pusillanimous wretches never were collected,” Montgomery wrote his wife. “Could I, with decency, leave the army in its present situation, I would not serve an hour longer.”

If Montgomery could not abandon the Northern Army, Schuyler could and did. Crippled by rheumatic and perhaps malarial miseries, he reported to Philadelphia that “I am now so low as not to be able to hold the pen.” On September 16, soldiers hoisted him into a covered boat and rowed him in the rain back to a Ticonderoga sickbed. “If Job had been a general in my situation,” he wrote Congress, “his memory had not been so famous for patience.”

Further misfortune befell the invaders when Ethan Allen, the conqueror of Ticonderoga, foolishly decided to storm Montreal with a small band of henchmen rather than enlist Canadian recruits in the countryside, as he had been instructed. Described by one acquaintance as “a singular compound of local barbarisms, scriptural phrases, and oriental wildness,” Allen hoped for the glory of a quick victory. But as he approached the city, several dozen regulars and two hundred French and English militiamen sortied through the gates on September 25 to catch him by surprise along the St. Lawrence. “The last I see of Allen,” one of his men wrote, “he was surrounded, had hold with both hands the muzzle of a gun, swinging it around.” Captured and paraded through Montreal, he would be shipped to England in thirty-pound leg irons and imprisoned in the lower reaches of Pendennis Castle, on the southern coast of Cornwall, a cautionary tale for traitors to the Crown. Allen’s “rash and ill-concerted measure,” an American chaplain told his journal, “not only served to dishearten the Army and weaken it, but it prejudiced the people against us and both made us enemies and lost us friends.” Montgomery added in a dispatch to Schuyler, “I have to lament Mr. Allen’s imprudence and ambition.”

Despite such misfires and misadventures, Montgomery—tall, bald, and Dublin-born—soon had the whip hand at St. Johns. Reinforcements streamed north across Lake Champlain in October, including Connecticut regiments and a New York artillery detachment with siege guns, bringing American strength to 2,700. Gunners built batteries south of the fort and across the Richelieu to the northeast. More than 350 men slipped ten miles down the river to fire a few cannonballs at the high-walled British fort at Chambly. The 84-man garrison promptly surrendered on October 18, handing over 124 barrels of gunpowder, 233 muskets, 6,600 cartridges in copper-hooped barrels, and ample stocks of flour, pork, and marine supplies.

“We have gotten six tons of powder which, with God’s blessing, will finish our business here,” Montgomery wrote Schuyler. No less ominous for St. Johns, a putative rescue force from Montreal—some eight hundred habitants, Indians, loyal merchants, and regulars—assembled on an island in the St. Lawrence on October 30, then beat across the river toward Longueuil in several dozen bateaux. Three hundred Americans rose up along the south bank to scourge the boats with musketry and grapeshot, killing between a few and a few dozen—depending on the account—without a single Yankee casualty. The bateaux scattered, the habitants and loyalists deserted in droves, and St. Johns’ last hope for salvation vanished.

Three hundred yards northwest of the beleaguered fort, yet another American battery had been hacked from the swamp and furnished with cannons, mortars, and a chest-high breastworks. Men lugged iron balls from the Richelieu on their shoulders or in slings made from their trousers, while gunners packed the newly acquired powder into cartridges and explosive shells. At ten a.m. on Wednesday, November 1—All Saints’ Day—the guns opened in concert with the battery across the river in a stupefying bombardment of a thousand balls and more than fifty shells, which by sunset had “knocked everything in the fort to shatters,” an American officer exulted. Montgomery halted the cannonade long enough to send a white flag to the gate, carried by a Canadian prisoner who swore upon the Holy Evangelist that the rescue force from Montreal had indeed been routed, that no more help was forthcoming, and that further resistance would bring “melancholy consequences.”

After a fifty-three-day siege, with sixty defenders killed or wounded, his food and powder all but gone, Major Preston had finally had enough. He stalled for a day by trying to squeeze concessions from the Americans. Would the honors of war be observed? Could officers keep their baggage? Sidearms? Why not permit the men to sail for England on parole? “Let me entreat you, sir, to spare the lives of a brave garrison,” Montgomery told him. The British would be “treated with brotherly affection” in Connecticut jails. Negotiations briefly broke down when the proposed articles of capitulation suggested that British “fortitude and perseverance” should have been “exerted in a better cause.” Preston declared that his men would rather “die with their arms in their hands than submit to the indignity of such a reflection.” Montgomery struck the clause but threatened to resume his bombardment “if you do not surrender this day.”

At eight a.m. on November 3, a wet, blustery Friday, Montgomery’s men shouldered their firelocks in a field south of the fort. A few wore smart uniforms, like the gunners in blue coats with buff facings; more sported drab yeoman togs and slouch hats. To the trill and rap of fife and drum, the defeated garrison marched six abreast with colors flying through the gate, some of them mud-caked, their feet bound in rags. First came the 26th Foot in brick-red coats with pale yellow facings; then the Royal Fusiliers with blue facings; then Royal Artillery troops in dark blue coats and once-white waistcoats, drawing two small guns; and finally sailors in pigtails, Indians in blankets and feathers, a few kilt-clad Scots, carpenters, cooks, servants, and a gaggle of women and fretful children. At least one officer kept a locket portrait of his lover hidden under his tongue in case the Yankees began to pilfer. Major Preston strutted to the front of the American ranks. “The tears run down his cheeks,” a Connecticut soldier reported, “and he cried like a child.” On Preston’s order the troops stacked their muskets—officers kept swords and sidearms—then shuffled into the waiting bateaux for the long journey across Champlain to captivity in New England.

More than three-quarters of the British regulars in Canada had now been captured or killed, along with virtually all of the trained artillerymen. The booty from St. Johns included seventeen fine brass guns, two brass howitzers, twenty-two iron guns, eight hundred stand of small arms, sails, pitch, tar, and precious nails. The cost of the long siege to the American invaders was steep—a hundred combat casualties and another thousand men, including their commanding general, sent back to New York with various ailments. But the front door to Canada had swung open, and thousands of additional Yankees stood ready to march through.

As the last of his captives vanished up the gray Richelieu, Brigadier General Montgomery took a moment to scribble his wife a note. “If I live,” he wrote, “you may depend upon it that I will see you this winter.”

That Richard Montgomery now prepared to finish conquering Canada for the American cause was no small irony, for as a young regular officer in an earlier life he had helped to conquer it for the British Empire. The youngest son of an Irish baronet, he was commissioned as an ensign after two years of college in Dublin, then devoted sixteen years to the king’s service, half of it in North America and the West Indies. Slender and lightly pocked, he blamed “the heat and severity” of combat in Martinique and Cuba in 1762 for the loss of his hair; he blamed a girlfriend for other disorders. “She has clapped me,” he wrote a fellow officer in 1769. “The flames of my passion have subsided with those of my urine.”

An end to the French war meant an end to promotions, and in 1772, after years as a captain—including wartime service at St. Johns and Montreal—Montgomery in disgust sold his commission for £1,500. “I have of late conceived a violent passion,” he wrote a cousin. “I have cast my eyes on America, where my pride and poverty will be much more at their ease.” Packing up his volumes of Hume, Montesquieu, and Franklin’s Experiments, as well as a new microscope, surveying equipment, and draftsman’s tools, he sailed for New York and bought a seventy-acre farm just north of Manhattan. Still only thirty-four, in July 1773 he married well: Janet Livingston was the eldest daughter of a prominent New York patriot judge who owned a thirteen-thousand-acre estate in Albany County. Elected to the New York Provincial Congress when political unrest turned to rebellion, Captain Montgomery abruptly found himself appointed a brigadier general; his “air and manner designated the real soldier,” one subordinate wrote. But the honor only deepened his Irish fatalism. He told a former British comrade of a premonition that he would die “by a pistol,” and before marching north he wrote his will. “I have been dragged from obscurity much against my inclination and not without some struggle,” he told Janet, adding that as soon as he could “slip my neck out of the yoke, I will return to my family and farm.”

That yoke still held him, and the ordeal at St. Johns—“half-drowned rats crawling through the swamp,” in his description—showed Montgomery how removed the Northern Army was from disciplined proficiency, regardless of its success in capturing the fort. After one contentious conference with his subordinates, he wrote on the minutes, “I can’t help observing to how little purpose I am [here].” To his brother-in-law he denounced “the badness of the troops. The New Englanders, I am now convinced, are the worst stuff imaginable for soldiers.… The privates are all generals, but not soldiers.” New York regiments were “the sweepings of York’s streets.…’Tis no uncommon thing to see an officer beastly drunk even on duty.” Shortly before Preston’s surrender, Montgomery narrowly escaped death when a British cannonball sliced the tail from his uniform coat, knocking him to the ground. Disheartened and depressed, he contemplated resignation. “I have not the talents or temper for such a command,” he wrote Schuyler, who was still overseeing the invasion from afar. Generalship, he added, required “acting eternally out of character.”

But the command was his until his superiors decided otherwise, and now Montreal beckoned. The Northern Army plodded northwest from St. Johns toward the St. Lawrence, through “mud and mire and scarce a spot of dry ground for miles together,” a Connecticut chaplain noted. Baggage carts sank to their axles on roads corduroyed with crumbling logs. Foul weather and a shortage of boats delayed crossing the river, but on November 9 Montgomery sent an ultimatum: unless Montreal unlocked her gates, he would raze the town, leaving eight thousand residents homeless in a Canadian winter.

Built on a ridge parallel to the river’s northwestern bank, with eighteen-foot plastered stone walls described as “little more than an egg shell” and a loopholed parapet in bad repair, Montreal was built for commerce and God’s glory, not for fighting, except when drunken fur traders grew rowdy. Sometimes called Ville-Marie, the city of Mary, it was founded in the mid-seventeenth century as a shrine to the Virgin, a prayerful place of ecstasies, visions, converted Indians, and beaver pelts. River navigation ended here, and here the boundless western wilderness began. The town had become a “somewhat unsavory assemblage of merchants on the make,” a Canadian history observed. “It was no accident that New France never had a printing press.” A British officer reported that “the people throw all their dung on the ice in order that it may float away when the winter breaks up.”

By Sunday, November 12, when Montgomery reached Récollet, in the southwest suburbs, a delegation of frightened merchants agreed to his capitulation terms. On Monday morning they swung open the Récollet Gate and the Northern Army, led by two wheeled field guns, rambled into Montreal. Some wore British red coats confiscated at Chambly or St. Johns, but most were now so shabby that “a beggar in Europe would be better dressed than they were,” one priest said. Down Rue Notre-Dame the column tramped, past seminaries, dingy trapper taverns in the Rue de la Capitale, and a few fine houses of dressed gray limestone with tin roofs and green shutters. The Yankees camped in public storehouses and the citadel barracks at the north end of town. Most took it as a good sign when a marble bust of George III was decapitated by an anonymous vandal and dumped down a well in the Place d’Armes.

Rarely had a fortified town fallen so easily, yet Montgomery took little solace in the triumph. He warned Schuyler on November 13 that his troops were “exceedingly turbulent & indeed mutinous.” Only by promising that they could soon go home had he been able “to coax them to Montreal.” He was hounded by a “legion of females” pleading for British and Canadian husbands, brothers, and sons captured in the past month, while also battling his own soldiers over their confiscation of those redcoat uniforms. “There was no driving it into their noodles that the clothing was really the property of the [British] soldier, that he had paid for it,” Montgomery wrote Janet. To Schuyler he added, “I must go home.… I am weary of power.” He suggested that Schuyler come to Montreal, or that General Lee take command in Canada, or that Congress send a delegation to oversee the invasion.

None of that was likely with winter descending, and he knew it. Montgomery would have to soldier on alone. One final objective remained before Canada could be considered an American possession, and that lay 144 miles down the St. Lawrence. “I need not tell you that till Quebec is taken, Canada is unconquered,” he wrote his brother-in-law. To Janet he added, “I have courted fortune and found her kind. I have one more favor to solicit, and then I have done.”

Forty miles downstream, perhaps the only man able to save Canada for the Crown now pondered how to reverse Montgomery’s fortunes. Major General Guy Carleton, governor of the province and commander of the few royal forces still intact, had narrowly escaped capture in Montreal. A few hours before the invaders reached Récollet, Carleton and ninety loyal companions slipped through the shadows to a St. Lawrence wharf, tumbled onto the brig Gaspé and ten smaller vessels, then shoved off for Quebec. A witness described the departure as “the saddest funeral.” They had reached Sorel—less than halfway to their destination, at the mouth of the Richelieu—when opposing easterly winds and the sudden appearance of American shore batteries forced them to drop anchor to await a dark night and a following breeze before running the gantlet. “I shall try to retard the evil hour,” Carleton had written Lord Dartmouth, “though all my hopes of succor now begin to vanish.”

Even becalmed in the middle of nowhere, Guy Carleton was a formidable enemy. One acquaintance called him “a man of ten thousand eyes … not to be taken unawares.” He had showed his contempt for the Americans by refusing to read Montgomery’s surrender demand in Montreal, instead ordering the town executioner to ritually tread on the paper before tossing it with tongs into the fireplace. At fifty-one, he was tall and straight, with thinning hair, bushy brows, and cheeks beginning to jowl; a biographer described his “enormous nose mounted like a geological formation in the middle of his rather shapely face.” Like Montgomery, he was of Anglo-Irish gentry, and also a third son. Commissioned in 1742, he had been named quartermaster general by his friend James Wolfe for the 1759 expedition that captured Quebec but cost General Wolfe his life. In his will, Wolfe left his books and a thousand pounds to Carleton, who had survived a head wound in that battle and would survive three more wounds in other scraps.

He was quick-tempered, autocratic, humane, and secretive—“everything with him is mystery,” a British major observed. Another subordinate called him “one of the most distant, reserved men in the world; he has a rigid strictness in his manner, very unpleasing.… In time of danger he possesses a coolness and steadiness.” The king himself had praised Carleton, calling him “gallant & sensible” and noting that his “uncorruptness is universally acknowledged.” Appointed governor of Canada in 1768, he soon returned to England—in one of his fourteen Atlantic crossings—to advocate the bold, progressive reform that became known as the Quebec Act. During the four years needed to persuade Parliament, Carleton also met and married Maria Howard, an earl’s daughter almost thirty years his junior; she had been educated in Versailles, a useful pedigree when they returned to Canada together in late 1774.

He found North America in turmoil, of course, with the fetid spirit of liberty threatening British sovereignty north and south. No sooner had his Quebec Act taken effect than Carleton declared martial law and sent Maria home, the better to battle American interlopers. If the Canadian clergy and affluent French seigneurs supported him and his reforms, the habitants were wary and the English merchants mostly hostile because of his disdain for democratic niceties. Before fleeing Montreal just ahead of Montgomery, Carleton wrote Dartmouth that his scheme to defend Canada had failed: Lake Champlain lost, the outposts at Chambly and St. Johns overrun, Montreal doomed, and the militia hopelessly inert because of “the stupid baseness of the Canadian peasantry.” No longer did Britain have certain military advantages that had helped conquer New France fifteen years earlier, notably logistics bases in New England and New York and thousands of armed American provincials fighting for the Crown; in fact, hundreds of Canadians—the “lower sort”—had now rallied to the rebel cause. When this dispatch reached London, a courtier concluded that Carleton was “one of those men who see affairs in the most unfavorable light.”

By Wednesday night, November 15, Carleton saw little reason for optimism on the dark, swirling St. Lawrence. Gunfire from American cannons on both shores, as well as from a floating battery, swept the British vessels “in such a quantity all the soldiers left the deck,” a mariner reported. Frightened sailors refused to go aloft to loosen the sails. Pilots turned mutinous, the wind remained contrary, and the master of a British munitions ship carrying several tons of gunpowder vowed to surrender rather than be blown to flinders. A truce flag from Sorel brought another American ultimatum, and this time Carleton had no executioner’s fire tongs at hand. Colonel James Easton wrote:

General Montgomery is in possession of the fortress Montreal.… Your own situation is rendered very disagreeable.… If you will resign your fleet to me immediately without destroying the effects on board, you and your men shall be used with due civility.

Failure to comply would result in the squadron’s annihilation by 32-pounders, the Americans warned, though in truth they had no guns that large.

The moment had arrived for desperate measures. On Thursday night, with help from Jean Baptiste Bouchette—a sloop captain known as the “Wild Pigeon” for his stealth and speed—Carleton disguised himself as a habitant in a tasseled wool cap, moccasins, and a blanket coat belted with a ceinture fléchée, the traditional peasant sash. Over the Gaspé’s rail he climbed, and into a waiting skiff with an orderly, an aide, and several crewmen. At Bouchette’s direction, they steered for the river’s narrow northern channel, shipping the muffled oars and paddling with cupped hands past American campfires and barking dogs for more than thirty miles to the trading town of Trois-Rivières. There an armed two-masted snow, the Fell, would carry him farther downstream.

Behind them, their erstwhile comrades dumped most of the gunpowder and shot into the St. Lawrence, then struck their flags in surrender. Even without the powder, more spoils fell into American hands: 11 rivercraft, 760 barrels of flour, 675 barrels of beef, 8 chests of arms, entrenching tools, additional red coats, 200 pairs of shoes, and more than 100 prisoners, among them Brigadier General Richard Prescott. Carleton had again made good his escape, slipping into Fortress Quebec on November 19. “To the unspeakable joy of the friends of the government, & to the utter dismay of the abettors of sedition and rebellion, Gen. Carleton arrived,” a customs officer recorded. “We saw our salvation in his presence.”

But as he stripped off his peasant disguise to reemerge as the king’s satrap in Canada, Carleton hardly felt like a savior. “We have so many enemies within,” he privately wrote Dartmouth from Château St. Louis, the governor’s palace. “I think our fate extremely doubtful, to say nothing worse.” Of even greater concern were enemies without. As a Quebec merchant had just written, “Intelligence has been received that one Arnold, with 1,500 woodsmen, marched from … New England the first of October on an expedition against this place. Their intention must be to enter the city by assault.”

That was precisely Colonel Benedict Arnold’s intention. The former Connecticut apothecary, who had captured Ticonderoga in cahoots with the star-crossed Ethan Allen, was gathering strength twenty miles west of Quebec City, amid aspen and birch groves in Pointe-aux-Trembles, a riverine hamlet with a church, a nunnery, and a few farmhouses built of flint cobbles. His 675 emaciated men—less than two-thirds the number that had started north with him from Cambridge almost two months earlier—were recuperating from a grueling trek through the Maine wilderness, already lauded by one Canadian admirer as “an undertaking above the race of men in this debauched age.” The last miles along the St. Lawrence had been particularly painful. “Most of the soldiers were in constant misery,” a Connecticut private wrote, “as they were bare-footed, and the ground frozen and very uneven. We might have been tracked all the way by the blood from our shattered hoofs.” At Arnold’s request, all shoemakers around Pointe-aux-Trembles were now sewing moccasins for the men from badly tanned hides. Habitants brought hampers of roast beef, pork, potatoes, and turnips, despite a recent church edict that barred those disloyal to the Crown from receiving Holy Communion, baptism, or burial in sacred ground. Once his men regained their vigor and were reinforced by Montgomery’s troops from Montreal, Arnold planned to “knock up a dust with the garrison at Quebec, who are already panic-struck.” His only regret was not capturing the city already. “Had I been ten days sooner,” he wrote Washington on November 20, “Quebec must inevitably have fallen into our hands.”

Even now, gaunt after his Maine anabasis, Arnold at thirty-four was muscular and graceful, with black hair, a swarthy complexion, and that long, beaky nose. He was adept at fencing, boxing, sailing, shooting, riding, and ice-skating. “There wasn’t any waste timber in him,” a subordinate observed. Restive and audacious, he was “as brave a man as ever lived,” in one comrade’s estimation, and as fine a battle captain as America would produce that century, a man born to lead other men in the dark of night. Yet he would forever be an enigma, beset with both a gnawing sense of grievance and the nattering enmity of lesser fellows. His destiny, as the historian James Kirby Martin later wrote, encompassed both “the luminescent hero and the serpentine villain.” His Christian name meant “blessed,” but that came to be a central irony in his life, for his was an unquiet soul.

His father was a drunk merchant who had started life as a cooper’s apprentice, rising high only to tumble low, from the owner of a fine house and a prominent pew in the First Church of Norwich to arrest for public inebriation and debt. Young Benedict was forced to leave school, abandoning the family plan for him to attend Yale. Instead he was apprenticed in 1756 to two brothers who ran a successful pharmacy and trading firm; the boy would later describe himself as a coward until forced to head his household at fifteen. “Be dutiful to superiors, obliging to equals, and affable to inferiors, if any such there be,” his mother had told him before her death three years later, adding, “Don’t neglect your precious soul, which once lost can never be regained.”

His masters were generous and trusting. They sent him on trading voyages to the West Indies and London and, when he turned twenty-one, provided him with a handsome grubstake of £500. He set up his own emporium in the growing seaport of New Haven, selling Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, Francis’s Female Elixir, and tincture of valerian, an aphrodisiac, as well as earrings, rosewater, surgical instruments, and books ranging from Paradise Lost to Practical Farrier. His black-and-gold storefront sign proclaimed, SIBI TOTIQUE—for himself and for everyone—and he did not correct customers who called him “Dr. Arnold from London.”

His ambitions grew with his business. He bought a forty-ton sloop, the Fortune, running her from Montreal to the Bay of Honduras, trading livestock, furs, Spanish gold, cheese, slaves, cotton, and salt. By 1766, at twenty-five, “Captain Arnold” owned three ships and was an adept smuggler of contraband rum and Central American mahogany. More than once he ran afoul of associates, who accused him of jackleg business practices; in that same year he was briefly arrested after failing to pay £1,700 to his London creditors. Even so, as one of New Haven’s most prosperous merchants, he married, had three sons, joined the Freemasons to widen his social and business circles, and built a house overlooking the harbor, with a gambrel roof, marble fireplaces, wainscoting, and an orchard with a hundred fruit trees. But British commercial repression pinched him; he grew political, then radical, and in March 1775 was elected captain of a militia company, the Foot Guards, by comrades who saw him as a stalwart, worldly leader.

With the seizure of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Arnold burst into American history, never to leave. After securing both forts in May 1775, wearing a scarlet militia uniform coat with buff facings and big epaulettes, he led three dozen men on a brief raid across Lake Champlain into Canada to capture thirteen prisoners and a sloop—the George, which he renamed Enterprise—in what the biographer Willard Sterne Randall would call the first American naval assault as well as the first American attack of a foreign country. In a long letter to the Continental Congress, Arnold was also among the first to urge an invasion of Canada via St. Johns, Chambly, and Montreal, offering to lead the expedition himself “with the smiles of heaven.” Congress approved the plan but not the planner, selecting Schuyler and Montgomery instead. A few weeks later, Arnold rode into Cambridge to settle his financial accounts with the provincial congress, which had subsidized the Ticonderoga escapade. He took the opportunity to convince Washington that he was the right man to lead a second invasion force directly to Quebec along a rugged trace used in the past century by Indian raiders, Jesuit missionaries, and French trappers. His proposed route followed the Kennebec and Chaudière Rivers from the coast of the Eastern Country—still part of Massachusetts, but later to become Maine—to the St. Lawrence valley.

The boy in the shop apron had made good. Yet throughout his remarkable ascent he was bedeviled by episodes that suggested a trajectory forever wobbling between shadow and bright light. An accusation in 1770 that he was a drunken whoremonger who had contracted a venereal disease in the West Indies led to a lawsuit, depositions from business colleagues “in regard to my being in perfect health,” and a duel. In another incident, Arnold allegedly dragged a sailor from a tavern and administered forty lashes for gossiping about his smuggling activities. Success at Ticonderoga was followed by an ugly quarrel over who was in command—“I took the liberty of breaking his head,” Arnold wrote after thrashing another militia colonel—and a brief mutiny during which Arnold was locked in the Enterprise cabin. “Col. Arnold has been greatly abused and misrepresented by designing persons,” one soldier wrote, but others saw him as headstrong and arrogant. After departing Crown Point in a huff, he learned that his wife had abruptly died, leaving him with three boys under the age of eight. He put them in the care of his faithful sister and headed for Cambridge, telling a friend that “an idle life under my present circumstances would be but a lingering death.”

Washington chose to take a chance on him. The commander in chief had contemplated a similar expedition through Canada’s back door, and this pugnacious, enterprising, persuasive merchant—this fighter—seemed worth a gamble. In early September, he gave Arnold a Continental Army colonel’s commission and permission to recruit eleven hundred “active woodsmen” from the regiments in Cambridge for a mission that was “secret though known to everybody,” as one officer noted. “Not a moment’s time is to be lost,” Washington wrote. “The season will be considerably advanced.” He believed “that Quebec will fall into our hands a very easy prey.”

Few military expeditions would be more heroic or more heartbreaking. “The drums beat and away they go,” a rifleman in Cambridge wrote a friend, “to scale the walls of Quebec and spend the winter in joy and festivity among the sweet nuns.” The “active woodsmen” were mostly farmers, with a few adventurous oddballs like a wiry nineteen-year-old named Aaron Burr, grandson of the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards and son of the former president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey, where young Burr was admitted at age thirteen. Washington also provided three companies of riflemen from Virginia and Pennsylvania, partly to get them out of Cambridge; their acknowledged leader was a deep-chested teamster, sawyer, and “formidable border pugilist” named Daniel Morgan. Captain Morgan, known as “the Old Wagoner,” carried a turkey call made out of a conch shell. He also wore scars from a savage British flogging administered after he beat up an insolent regular in 1755 and from an Indian musket ball that perforated his cheek a year later.

After marching forty miles north to Newburyport, Arnold’s brigade paraded with flags unfurled near the Merrimack River, listened to a sermon drawn from Exodus in the First Presbyterian Church—“If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence”—then clambered onto eleven coasters stinking of fish. “Weighed anchor,” the soldier Ebenezer Wild told his journal, “with a pleasant gale, our colors flying, drums beating, fifes playing, and the hills all round covered with pretty girls weeping for their departing swains.” The men soon grew seasick—“indifferent whether I lived or died,” as one wrote—despite the two hundred pounds of ginger Arnold distributed as an antidote. But by September 22 they had traveled over one hundred miles up the Maine coast, past Honeywell Head and Merrymeeting Bay to Reuben Colburn’s shipyard on the banks of the Kennebec.

Here, on Washington’s orders, 220 flat-bottomed bateaux were under construction, with flaring sides, tapered ends, and more than 1,300 paddles, oars, and setting poles. One sniff told the men that unseasoned, green pine boards had been used. Not only were the boats cursedly heavy, but they leaked from the moment they touched water, requiring constant bailing. With seams opening faster than they could be caulked, casks of dried peas, salt fish, and beef swelled and spoiled; a hundred tons of provisions—the men ate three thousand pounds of food each day—dwindled at an alarming rate as the armada nosed north. Shallows scraped the bateaux bottoms, forcing men into the frigid river for miles on end, pushing from the stern, pulling by the painters, and cursing the boatbuilders as “infamous villains.” “You would have taken the men for amphibious animals,” Arnold wrote Washington, “as they were a great part of the time under water.” Surveyor John Pierce told his diary, “Every man’s teeth chattered in their heads.” They chattered more upon waking on the bitter night of September 29 to find wet clothing “frozen a pane of glass thick,” as another man wrote, “which proved very disagreeable, being obliged to lie in them.” Arnold urged them on with cries of “To Quebec and victory!”

Hemlock and spruce crowded the riverbanks, and autumn colors smeared the hillsides. But soon the land grew poor, with little game to be seen. Ticonic Falls was the first of four cataracts on the Kennebec, and the first of many portages that required lugging bateaux, supplies, and muskets for miles over terrain ever more vertical; from sea level they would climb fourteen hundred feet. “This place,” one officer wrote as they rigged ropes and pulleys, “is almost perpendicular.” Sickness set in—“a sad plight with the diarrhea,” noted Dr. Isaac Senter, the expedition surgeon—followed by the first deaths, from pneumonia, a falling tree, an errant gunshot.

More than 130 miles upriver they left the Kennebec in mid-October and crossed the Great Carrying Place—a thirteen-mile, five-day portage, much of it ascending—to reach the Dead River, a dark, reedy stream that slithered like a black snake toward the Canadian uplands. A terrible storm on October 21, perhaps the tail of an Atlantic hurricane, caused the Dead to rise eight feet in nine hours, sweeping away bedrolls, guns, and food. With “trees tumbling on all quarters,” the brigade clung to hilltops and ridgelines. Six inches of snow fell three nights later. More men grew sick, or worse, in what Dr. Senter described as “a direful, howling wilderness.” Jemima Warner, among the few women camp followers, tended her sick husband until he died; a comrade recorded that lacking a shovel, “she covered him with leaves, and then took his gun and other implements, and left him with a heavy heart.” In late October Arnold learned that his rear battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Roger Enos, had turned back without permission, taking three hundred troops and much of the expedition’s reserve food supply. “Our men made a general prayer,” Captain Henry Dearborn wrote in his diary, “that Colonel Enos and all his men might die by the way, or meet with some disaster.” Back in Cambridge, Enos would be arrested, court-martialed, and acquitted; those who could testify to his venality were in Canada.

“We are in an absolute danger of starving,” a Rhode Island captain wrote. By the time Enos’s betrayal was discovered, their food stocks had dwindled to five pints of flour and less than an ounce of salt pork per man. “Dollars were offered for bits of bread as big as the palm of one’s hand,” Ebenezer Wild recorded. Then even that was gone. A dozen hunters “killed one partridge and divided it into 12 parts,” John Pierce wrote on October 29. John Joseph Henry, a sixteen-year-old Pennsylvania rifleman, described how a small duck was shot and carved by his comrades “most fairly into ten shares, each one eyeing the integrity of the division.”

Stews were boiled from rawhide thongs, moose-skin breeches, and the rough hides that lined the bateaux floors. Men gnawed on shaving soap, tree sap, birch bark, and lip balm. “This day I roasted my shot pouch and eat it,” wrote rifleman George Morison. “It was now four days since I had eat anything save the skin of a squirrel.” Young John Henry was offered a greenish broth said to be bear stew, but “this was instantly known to be untrue. It was that of a dog. He was a large black Newfoundland dog” that had belonged to Captain Dearborn, a New Hampshire physician who had fought at Bunker Hill. Men also gobbled down the feet and skin. Jeremiah Greenman described adding “the head of a squirrel with a parcel of candlewicks boiled up together, which made a very fine soup without salt.… Thinking it was the best that I ever eat.”

They trudged on, across a snowy plateau known as the Height of Land, then skirted Lac-Mégantic before starting down the wild, shallow Chaudière—the word meant “boiler”—which tumbled north a hundred miles to the St. Lawrence. More men died, fell behind, or wandered into the trackless forest, never to be seen again. “I must confess that I began to be concerned about our situation,” Lieutenant William Humphrey told his journal. “There was no sign of any humane being.” By early November, a rifleman wrote, “many of the company were so weak that they could hardly stand.… They reeled about like drunken men.”

Salvation appeared as a bovine apparition: at midday on Thursday, November 2, forty miles north of Lac-Mégantic, a small herd of horned cattle ambled up the riverbank, driven by several French Canadians. “It was the joyfulest sight that I ever saw,” Jeremiah Greenman wrote. “Some could not refrain from crying for joy.” Ravenous men slashed open a heifer and threw skin, entrails, “and everything that could be eat” on an open fire. Engorged, they sliced “savage shoes” from the hide for their ruined feet. “Blessed our stars,” Dr. Senter noted in his diary.

They also blessed Arnold, for he had saved them—though only after badly miscalculating the distance and duration of their journey. From Colburn’s shipyard to Quebec was 270 miles, not 180, as he had told Washington, and the journey would take six weeks, not twenty days. Yet his fortitude and iron will won through. In late October, aware that his men were failing fast, he had lunged ahead with a small vanguard down the Chaudière, racing through the rapids—smashing three bateaux against the rocks and capsizing others—before reaching Sartigan, a hardscrabble settlement of whitewashed houses with thatched roofs and paper windows. Astonished Canadian farmers, he wrote, “received us in the most hospitable manner.” Arnold sent the horned cattle upriver, soon followed by mutton, flour, tobacco, and horses to evacuate the lame.

In the coming days his troops straggled into Sartigan, “more like ghosts than men,” wrote one rifleman. Filthy, feeble, their clothes torn and their beards matted, they “resembled those animals of New Spain called ourang-outangs,” another man wrote. A captain told his family, “We have waded 100 miles.” Of the 1,080 who set out from Cambridge in September, about 400 had turned back, or had been sent home as invalids, or had died on the trek, their bones scattered as mileposts across the border uplands. “Our march has been attended with an amazing deal of fatigue,” Arnold told Washington, “… with a thousand difficulties I never apprehended.” The commanding general in reply would praise “your enterprising & persevering spirit,” adding, “It is not in the power of any man to command success, but you have done more—you have deserved it.”

Ever aggressive, Arnold next resolved to seize Quebec immediately. Over the following week, as the men regained health and weight, he hired carpenters and smiths to make scaling ladders, spears, and grappling hooks. Firelocks were repaired, canoes purchased. Company by company, the men moved north to Pointe-Levy, three miles up the St. Lawrence from Quebec, where locals welcomed them with a country dance featuring bagpipes, fiddle music, and drams of rum. John Pierce wrote of his hosts, “They have their saints placed as big as life which they bow down to and worship as they pass them.”

At nine p.m. on November 13, a calm, cold Monday with a late moonrise, the river crossing began in forty canoes. Carefully skirting two British warships that had recently appeared on the St. Lawrence—the Lizard, a frigate, and Hunter, a sloop—five hundred Americans landed at Wolfe’s Cove by four a.m. on Tuesday. They soon climbed the escarpment that nimble William Howe had scaled in 1759 to reach the Plains of Abraham, barely a cannon’s shot west of Quebec’s massive walls. Later in the day Arnold’s men paraded within a few hundred yards of the St. Louis Gate, marching to and fro, while shouting insults in a bootless effort to entice the defenders to fight in the open, just as Wolfe had baited the French sixteen years earlier.

“They huzzahed thrice,” a British officer reported. “We answered them with three cheers of defiance, & saluted them with a few cannon loaded with grape & canister shot. They did not wait for a second round.” Arnold also dispatched a white flag with a written ultimatum: “If I am obliged to carry the town by storm, you may expect every severity practiced on such occasions.” The demand, a Canadian historian later complained, included “the usual mixture of cant, bombast, threats, and bad taste so characteristic of the effusions of this generation of American commanders.” British gunners answered with an 18-pound ball fired from the parapet, spattering Arnold’s envoy with mud.

Even Colonel Arnold knew when the hour demanded prudence. He had no artillery, few bayonets, little cash, and almost a hundred broken muskets. A tally revealed that his men averaged only five reliable cartridges each. Informants told him the Quebec garrison had nearly nineteen hundred men after reinforcement by the Royal Navy, merchant seamen, and other armed loyalists, more than he’d expected. Although half were “obliged to bear arms against their inclination,” as Arnold wrote Montgomery, he calculated that two thousand attackers would be needed “to carry the town.” The informants also warned him that the defenders planned a sudden sally to catch him unawares.

He ordered the men assembled, and at three a.m. on November 19 they staggered west on bloody feet for Pointe-aux-Trembles to await Montgomery. “Very cold morning,” Pierce told his diary. “Ground frozen very hard.” An armed two-masted snow passed them, heading down the St. Lawrence for Quebec; on deck, they would later learn, stood General Carleton in his habitant disguise.

Having survived unspeakable hardship, many men desperately missed their homes and families. “God deliver me from this land of ignorance,” Pierce wrote, “and in his own due time return me once more where they can pronounce English.” Yet most recognized that more hardship lay ahead. “We have a winter’s campaign before us,” Captain Samuel Ward, Jr., told his family in Rhode Island. “But I trust we shall have the glory of taking Quebec!”

Good news out of Canada sparked jubilation from Cambridge to Philadelphia and beyond. The invasion gambit had all but succeeded. General Montgomery controlled the Lake Champlain–Richelieu corridor, as well as Montreal and the western St. Lawrence valley. He soon would move east to join forces with Colonel Arnold, now hailed as an American Hannibal for a feat likened to crossing the Alps with elephants in midwinter.

Canadian volunteers flocked to the American standard despite the clergy’s threat of eternal damnation. Some publicly acknowledged asking God to help les Bostonnais, as they called all Yankees. Habitants from sixteen parishes around Quebec City alone would assist the invaders by confiscating British supplies, detaining loyalists and overzealous priests, and ransacking the estates of wealthy seigneurs in a spate of score settling. Others provided firewood, built scaling ladders, and stood guard around American camps. “We can expect no assistance from the Canadian peasantry,” a Quebec merchant wrote. “They have imbibed a notion that if the rebels get entire possession of the country, they’ll be forever exempted from paying taxes.”

For the American invaders, the delay in taking St. Johns was nettlesome. A quicker capture of Montreal in early fall might have bagged Carleton and permitted the seizure of defenseless Quebec in a swift coup de main. Aware that Britain would likely dispatch a robust force in the spring to recoup the empire’s losses in Canada, both Washington and Schuyler believed that Fortress Quebec must be quickly reduced in the coming weeks, then manned and fortified over the winter to withstand the anticipated assault. Although more than six tons of gunpowder had been sent to the Northern Army, mostly from South Carolina and New York, shortages persisted of everything from food and winter clothing to money and munitions.

Still, with Montgomery and Arnold leading their “famine-proof veterans,” victory in the north seemed at hand. A Virginia congressman, Richard Henry Lee, spoke for many when he declared in Philadelphia, “No doubt is entertained here that this Congress will be shortly joined by delegates from Canada, which will then complete the union of fourteen provinces.”

6.
America Is an Ugly Job

LONDON, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1775

By late morning on Thursday, October 26, tens of thousands of high-spirited Londoners filled the streets around Parliament, lured by pleasant fall sunshine and the titillating expectation of trouble. Constables clustered outside the Swan tavern at Westminster Bridge and in St. James’s Park, and Foot Guards were issued ten musket cartridges apiece as a precaution. George III was to open a new session of Parliament this afternoon, but an American merchant named Stephen Sayre had been arrested at his Oxford Street house on suspicion of high treason; it was said that Sayre intended to kidnap the king, diverting his hijacked coach to the Tower, where bribed guards would lock the gates behind him and allow seditious rioters to ransack the arsenal. Skeptics declared that if such an outlandish plot existed, the conspirators should be sent to Bedlam asylum rather than to prison. But the authorities took no chances. Sayre himself had been dragged to the Tower, which “raised the curiosity of the public to an extravagant pitch,” the London Public Advertiser reported. “People imagine something very extraordinary is to happen.”

The clock over the main entrance at St. James’s Palace touched two p.m. as the king emerged, swaddled in silk and ermine. “The crowd was very great in the courtyard to see His Majesty get into the state coach,” a Guards lieutenant wrote. “Everybody agrees that His Majesty never went to the House with such universal shouts of applause.” In fact, many hisses could be heard amid the cheers when the royal procession lurched from the palace, led by two horse grenadiers holding drawn swords and three coaches, each pulled by six horses and stuffed with nobles and gentlemen-in-waiting. Behind them followed Horse Guards in red and gold, then trumpeters, Yeomen of the guard, and fourteen liveried footmen in ranks of two. The gilded coach carrying the king was unlike anything in the empire or, perhaps, the world: twenty-four feet long, thirteen feet tall, and weighing four tons, it was drawn—at a glacial pace—by eight Royal Hanoverian Cream horses, each the color of buttermilk and at least fifteen hands high. On the roof, three carved cherubs representing England, Scotland, and Ireland supported a gilt crown, and painted allegorical panels on the doors evoked imperial grandeur. A gilded, fish-tailed sea god sat at each corner above the iron-rimmed wheels to signify Britain’s maritime might—appropriately, since the coach’s tendency to pitch, yaw, and oscillate made riding in it like “tossing in a rough sea,” as a later monarch would complain.

A platoon of constables brought up the rear, scanning the crowd for kidnappers while George settled into his satin-and-velvet cushions. He could hear the hisses as well as the applause, but public disapproval rarely piqued him. He knew that most of his subjects were happy enough that fall. England had never harvested a finer wheat crop, bread prices were down, manufacturing was near full employment, and more money was changing hands in the kingdom “than at any other time since the memory of man,” as Lord Barrington put it. Annual deaths still exceeded christenings in London, but the gap had narrowed and Irish immigrants buoyed the population. Violent crime had dropped, and fewer debtors were being jailed. Life for many might still be nasty, brutish, and short, but less so.

The Americans, by contrast, appeared perpetually angry. How long ago it seemed that Harvard College had offered cash prizes for the best poems commemorating George’s reign—for the best Latin verse in hexameters, the best Latin ode, the best English long verse. The king tried to ignore things that vexed or displeased him, like the petitions from Bristol and Liverpool urging reconciliation, which he consigned to the “Committee of Oblivion,” or the annoying letters from John Wesley, that Methodist, who warned that the Americans “will not be frightened.… They are as strong as you, they are as valiant as you.” In the summer George had refused to receive what the colonials called their Olive Branch Petition, imploring the king to stop the war, repeal the Coercive Acts, and effect “a happy and permanent reconciliation.” He would not treat with rebels.

Lord North warned him that the insurrection had “now grown to such a height that it must be treated as a foreign war.” Casualty reports from Concord and Bunker Hill certainly bore out the first minister, not to mention the sour rumors from Canada. The king had responded in late August with a “Proclamation of Rebellion,” forbidding all commerce with the colonies and requiring every subject to help “in the suppression of such rebellion,” on pain of treason. The provincials were “misled by dangerous and ill designing men,” the king declared, “forgetting the allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them.” Heralds read the edict at Westminster, Temple Bar, the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere; hisses were heard then, too. He shrugged them off.

British colonial policy, quite simply, sought revenue for the greater good of the empire. But “that damned American war,” as North called it, forced the government to confront a displeasing dilemma: either accede to conciliation and forgo income from the colonies or prosecute a war that would cost more money than could ever be squeezed from America. Moreover, success in crushing the rebellion would likely be followed by an expensive, protracted occupation. Even from the lofty vantage of a throne, coherent British war aims were hard to discern.

Yet a king must remain steadfast, and George had thrown himself headlong into the role of captain general—studying military texts, visiting summer encampments, reviewing the Guards regiments. He continued to make his lists and his charts, of “ships building and repairing” at various yards; of guard vessels protecting ports and waterways; of “oak timber in store” (more than fifty-seven thousand loads); of royal ships in ordinary—the reserve fleet—including the number of guns mounted. He made more neat columns: of British garrisons abroad from 1764 to 1775; of the commanders of various cavalry units; of all his regiments, including those in Boston, with the number of officers, musicians, and the rank and file tabulated at the bottom of the page and his arithmetic scratchings in the margins.

Finally he sketched an organizational chart of his army in America, using tiny inked boxes hardly bigger than a pinhead, labeled with regimental numbers. Then he gave his draft to a better artist to convert into a smart diagram with copperplate script, symbols in colored pencils, and tiny cannon silhouettes to represent artillery batteries. It helped him to follow that damned American war.

The state coach clopped to a halt. Welcoming guns saluted the monarch’s arrival, rattling windows across Westminster. Horse Guards paraded in Parliament Street to “see that all was quiet,” the Public Advertiser noted. George strode into the former Queen’s Chamber at the southern end of the parliamentary warren, now used by the House of Lords. “Adorned with his crown and regal ornaments,” as the official parliamentary account recorded, he took his seat on a straight-backed throne. “He is tall, square over the shoulders,” an American loyalist in London wrote. “Shows his teeth too much. His countenance is heavy and lifeless, with white eyebrows.” Peers in crimson robes flanked him. On George’s command, the usher of the Black Rod summoned several hundred members of the Commons, who soon stood in the back in their coats and boots, shifting from one foot to the other since there were no benches for them. In his precise, regal voice, the king went straight to the American question.

Those who have long too successfully labored to inflame my people in America … now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion. They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force. They have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive, and judicial powers.

Parliament and the Crown had displayed “moderation and forbearance,” eager to prevent “the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war.” Alas, war had “become more general, and is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire. I need not dwell upon the fatal effects of the success of such a plan.”

The phrase “fatal effects” seemed to hang in the air. Upturned faces ringed the chamber, every peer and commoner in rapt attention.

“To put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions,” he continued, “I have increased my naval establishment and greatly augmented my land forces.” The full fury of the empire would be unleashed on the rebellion. The government also was considering “friendly offers of foreign assistance,” with treaties likely. He saw “no probability” that the French or other adversaries would intrude in this family squabble. Finally:

When the unhappy and deluded multitudes, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy.

In twenty minutes he was done and out the door, rumbling back to the palace in his monstrous coach.

A few naysayers disparaged the address. Horace Walpole, for one, counted “three or four gross falsehoods.” But the Commons voted with the usual hefty majority to thank His Majesty, noting that “on our firmness or indecision the future fate of the British Empire and of ages yet unborn will depend.” An independent America would be “a dangerous rival,” in which case “it would have been better for this country that America had never been known than that a great consolidated American empire should exist independent of Britain.”

The king could only agree. “Where the cause is just,” he would write, “I can never be dismayed.”

For George and Queen Charlotte, monarchical rhythms changed little from month to month, or year to year. “They both meet in the breakfast room about a half hour after 8. When she goes to the breakfast, she rings for the children,” the king had written in an account of their domestic life. “Every evening after dinner they retire into her apartments to drink coffee, & there they generally spend the remainder of their evening.” He fussed with his collections—barometers, clocks, coins, Handel oratorios—or immersed himself in a book and read aloud passages he found especially pithy. Both kept an orchestra and patronized the opera; he played a creditable flute, harpsichord, and violin. Much of their time in the Queen’s House—the family residence, later called Buckingham Palace—was spent instructing their growing brood in the ways of royalty, as in Charlotte’s letter to George P., the Prince of Wales, read to him by a tutor on his eighth birthday: “Above all things I recommend unto you to fear God.… We are all equal, and become only of consequence by setting good examples to others.”

For those with fine houses in the city’s fashionable squares—Berkeley, Grosvenor, Cavendish—the seating of Parliament intensified London’s social swirl. Parties and dinners were often scheduled for Wednesdays or Saturdays, when the Commons and Lords rarely convened. “Come to London and admire our plumes,” one woman wrote a friend in the provinces. “We sweep the skies! A duchess wears six feathers, a lady four, and every milkmaid one at each corner of her cap.” Gentlewomen’s hair, already piled high, grew higher when Georgiana Spencer, an earl’s daughter, created a three-foot coiffure by fastening horsehair pads to her own tresses; sometimes she decorated the tower with stuffed birds, waxed fruit, or tiny wooden trees and sheep. Hair grew so high that women could ride in closed carriages only by sitting on the floor. Young fops known as “Macaroni” pranced through Pall Mall and St. James’s Street in tight britches, high heels, and oversized buttons, their hair dyed red one day and blue the next. Oxford Magazine defined the Macaroni as “a kind of animal.… It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry … it wenches without passion.”

It also gambled without guilt. If London was “the devil’s drawing room,” in the phrase of author Tobias Smollett, gaming had become a diabolical national passion despite the monarch’s disapproval. Bets could be laid not only on horses, cockfights, and national lottery tickets, but on seemingly any future event, from how long a raindrop took to traverse a windowpane to how long Mr. Jones or Mrs. Smith would live; common wagers involved taking out insurance policies on other people’s lives. Walpole described seeing £10,000 on the table at Almack’s Club, where players wore eyeshades to conceal their emotions and leather cuffs to preserve their laced ruffles, then turned their coats inside out for luck. Military pensioners in Royal Hospital Chelsea were said to bet on lice races, and workmen repairing a floor in Middle Temple Hall found nearly two hundred dice that over the years had fallen between the cracks. “Play at whist, commerce, backgammon, trictrac, or chess,” one society dame advised, “but never at quinze, lou, brag, faro, hazard, or any game of chance.” Few heeded her.

London also had more than five hundred coffeehouses, and it was here that politics generally and the American question specifically might be discussed at any hour. Fratricidal war unsettled many Britons, who found it distasteful, if not unnatural. Some feared an endless war, citing published reports—often wildly exaggerated—that the Americans had two hundred thousand armed men, “well trained, ready to march,” and that gunsmiths outside Philadelphia were turning out five hundred stand of arms every fortnight. (Pennsylvania craftsmen collectively would make only 806 muskets in 1776.) Those sympathetic to the insurrectionists’ cause sometimes donated money to help rebel prisoners. The Duke of Richmond sailed his yacht, reportedly with an American pennant flying, through a British naval squadron.

“I am growing more and more American,” James Boswell had written in August. “I see the unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their assemblies. I think our ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate war.” Others were even more strident, like Lord Mayor John Wilkes, described as “a charming, cross-eyed demagogue” who was elected to Parliament after marriage to an heiress gave him the fortune to bribe enough voters. In answer to the king’s Thursday address, Wilkes, whose noisy radicalism made him enormously popular in the colonies, called the war “unjust, felonious, and murderous.” The Americans, he warned, “will dispute every inch of territory with you, every narrow pass, every strong defile, every Thermopylae, every Bunker Hill.” But opponents of coercion lacked strength and unity. When votes were tallied in the Commons, no faction proved more formidable than the government supporters known as the King’s Friends.

Newspaper resistance to colonial policy proved more obdurate, however. Britain now boasted 140 newspapers, including 17 in London. Thirteen million individual news sheets would be printed across the country in 1775, many of them handed round until the print wore off. A reader of the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser wrote that the “affairs of America engross so much of the attention of the public that every other consideration seems to be laid aside.” The king himself insisted that the latest London and American papers be delivered to him as soon as they arrived. A few publications hewed to the ministerial line. The Royal Gazette, denounced by competitors as the Royal Lying Gazette, promoted the delusions that the colonies would collapse without British trade and that most affluent Americans sought reconciliation. The government encouraged loyalty by paying printers and writers for anti-American screeds, often from the secret service fund and other obscure accounts. Some critics were silenced with cash: the acerbic editor of the Morning Post grew milder in exchange for almost £4,000 slipped under the table.

Yet many British “newspapers went straight for the King,” the historian George Otto Trevelyan later wrote, depicting him as “a bigoted and vindictive prince, whose administration was odious and corrupt.” The war became a cudgel with which political opponents could whack North, Dartmouth, and other government ministers. In early August, the Stamford Mercury printed a table showing that more British officers died at Bunker Hill than in the great Battle of Minden in 1759. Other accounts described hardship and poor morale in the British ranks. The radical Evening Post denounced the war as “unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable.”

Biographical profiles of American leaders appeared, their heroic attributes often contrasted to the venality of British politicians, even if the portraits were at times ludicrous. A new article in Town and Country told readers how George Washington’s daughter had fled to England after the general’s men slew her loyalist lover. Of greater consequence were loosened restrictions allowing parliamentary debates to be reported without the six-month delay previously required—or without pretending, as one magazine had, that the published transcript was from the “Senate of Lilliput.” The subsequent coverage, as historian Troy O. Bickham would write, “made the American Revolution the first event in which the government’s handling of a controversial conflict was aired before an eager national audience.”

Irked at the dissent, the government had stepped up covert surveillance and intelligence gathering. Suspected rebel sympathizers in London were ordered “narrowly watched,” their neighbors discreetly questioned about irregular activity. The baggage of passengers arriving from North America was searched for rebel correspondence. In a three-room suite off Lombard Street, a growing staff of secret service clerks by mid-September was opening and reading up to a hundred letters a day from the New York mailbags, with or without warrants, including private correspondence from Royal Navy officers and British officials in America. Additional letters were intercepted from foreign diplomats, European bankers, and political opponents trusting enough to rely on the Royal Mail. Especially intriguing correspondence, such as letters addressed to Dr. Franklin or General Lee, was copied and sent to the king and his senior ministers, while the originals went back to the General Post Office for normal delivery. A superintendent complained of overwork in deciphering coded letters and repairing wax seals so that they appeared unbroken. “I had so much to do,” he added in a November memorandum, “that I knew not which way to turn myself.” Despite such “difficulty, pains, and trouble,” the intelligence collected often was disappointingly thin, little more than gossip. George nevertheless carefully noted the time—to the minute, as usual—he received each batch of pilfered mail.

As October spilled into November, the king immersed himself in tactical details of the American war. George received copies not only of ministry dispatches to and from his generals, but also paymaster and commissary instructions. He reviewed intelligence on possible gunpowder shipments from Lisbon, clandestine activities in Amsterdam and Dunkirk, and river inspectors’ reports of suspicious cargoes on the Thames. He was consulted about the choice of commanders, the composition of particular regiments and where they should deploy, and the shipment of salt and candles across the Atlantic. He arranged, at an initial cost of £10,000, for twenty-four hundred German troops to serve at British garrisons in the Mediterranean, freeing regulars there for combat service in North America. He also weighed in on a proposed military assault on the southern colonies; on which widows and orphans of men killed in Boston should receive pensions; and on whether American prisoners should be shipped to India, where the insalubrious British territories were short of white settlers. When Catherine the Great declined to rent him twenty thousand Russian mercenaries—“she had not had the civility to answer in her own hand,” George wrote North “at 2 minutes past 8 p.m.” on November 3—he insisted that German legions could be hired “at a much cheaper rate, besides more expeditiously than if raised at home.” On his orders, the colonel negotiating with various German princelings was told, “Get as many men as you can.… The King is extremely anxious.”

Broad domestic support for the war eased his anxiety, despite the nattering newspapers and rapscallions like the lord mayor. Solid majorities in both the middle and the upper classes disapproved of colonial impertinence. Edward Gibbon, who was just finishing his first volume on the Roman empire’s collapse, wrote in October that the government’s “executive power was driven by the national clamor into the most vigorous and repressive measures.” Many towns across Britain sent endorsements of ministerial policy to London. “It was the war of the people,” North later observed. “It was popular at its commencement, and eagerly embraced by the people and the Parliament.”

Without doubt, the disruption of transatlantic trade injured some London merchants, as well as woolen workers in Norwich and linen weavers in Chester. British exports to America plummeted from almost £3 million in 1774 to barely £220,000 this year. But many other businesses thrived. Britain would be at war for more than half of the years between 1695 and 1815, and there was money to be made in those years by traders and vendors, brokers and wholesalers. “The greater number of them begin to snuff … a lucrative war,” wrote Edmund Burke, the Irish-born political philosopher who represented Bristol in the House of Commons. “War indeed is become a sort of substitute for commerce.” Orders poured in from Germany and the Baltics. New markets emerged in Spain, Russia, and Canada. Military contracts boomed, for uniform cloth, munitions, shipping, and provisions of every sort. “We never knew our manufactures, in general, in a more flourishing state,” a London firm wrote to a former American customer.

For the king, it was all part of what he called “a great national cause.” George “would put heart into the hesitant, stir up the idle, and check the treacherous,” the historian Piers Mackesy later observed. “He never wavered from the chosen object of the war.” If doubters could be bought, he bought them. To North on November 15, he applauded Generals Howe and Burgoyne for their “unanimity and zeal, the two great ingredients that seem to have been wanting in this campaign.” George also sought unanimity and zeal in his ministers, summoning them one by one for audiences in the Royal Closet, his conference room at St. James’s, where he talked much and listened little, bounding from subject to subject but always returning to the need for resolve in America. “We have a warm Parliament but an indolent Cabinet,” wrote Gibbon, who later told a friend, “The higher people are placed, the more gloomy are their countenances, the more melancholy their language.… I fear it arises from their knowledge—a late knowledge—of the difficulty and magnitude of the business.”

That surely was the case for Lord Dartmouth, the Psalm Singer and secretary of state for America. Having started a war, Dartmouth had no appetite to wage it; he now often abandoned Whitehall for the solace of his country estate. Franklin had once considered him “truly a good man,” but one “who does not seem to have strength equal to his wishes.” By early November, the secretary had arranged to leave the American Department by becoming lord privy seal, a pleasant, toothless sinecure. “Lord Dartmouth only stayed long enough,” Walpole sniffed, “to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.”

North also showed weakness in the knees. While affecting a determined ferocity toward the Americans—“we propose to exert ourselves using every species of force to reduce them,” he had declared in October—the first minister was weary of relentless opposition attacks, even if they were said to “sink into him like a cannonball into a wool sack.” Just hours after the king opened the new Parliament, North’s wife wrote that the pressure on her husband was “every day more disagreeable. Indeed it will be impossible for him to bear it much longer.” Since hearing of Bunker Hill, he had doubted that Britain could conquer America by force of arms. But when he hinted at resigning, George replied in a note, “You are my sheet anchor.” The king would further add, “It has not been my fate in general to be well served. By you I have, and therefore cannot forget it.” Loyal North would hold fast and true, even as his countenance grew gloomier, his language more melancholy. He “had neither devised the war nor liked it,” Walpole wrote, “but liked his place, whatever he pretended.”

Clearly the king needed another champion for his cause, a minister who shared his conviction that battering the colonies into submission was politically tenable, morally justified, and militarily necessary. And he had just the man in mind.

In a silver-tongued brogue that his English colleagues at times had difficulty deciphering, the bespectacled Edmund Burke, for three hours and twenty minutes on Thursday, November 16, implored the House of Commons to abandon the war. As usual during debates on the American problem, the galleries had been cleared of most spectators. Only “four women of quality and a few foreigners” had been admitted, reported the Morning Chronicle, perhaps after bribing the doorkeeper.

At Burke’s request, the Speaker, in his black gown and full-bottomed wig, ordered peace petitions from clergymen, clothiers, and tradesmen laid on the clerks’ table. Burke lamented “the horrors of a civil war … [that] may terminate in the dismemberment of our empire, or in a barren and ruinous conquest.” He warned that the longer the conflict persisted, the greater the chance “for the interference of the Bourbon powers” in France and Spain. At length he introduced a bill “for composing the present troubles” by suspending any taxes imposed on the Americans unless approved voluntarily by colonial assemblies. As Burke spoke, members squirmed on their benches, murmuring in assent or dissent. Some dozed or wandered out the door to Alice’s coffeehouse or to the barbershop.

Sitting next to Lord North on the Treasury bench to the right of the Speaker’s chair, a tall, dignified man with sharp eyesight despite his sixty years watched intently as more than a dozen speakers stood in turn to offer their opinions. Years before he had been a prominent general, and though now a bit fleshy he retained his military carriage; one colleague described his “long face, rather strong features, clear blue eyes … and a mixture of quickness and a sort of melancholy in his look.” Lord George Germain was known in Parliament for urging that Americans be treated with “a Roman severity,” and this week he had been appointed American secretary to replace the hapless Dartmouth. After nearly thirty-five years in the Commons, he now stood to deliver his first speech not only as a cabinet member but as a man whose bellicose fervor would make him “chief minister for the civil war,” as one British official called him.

He began slowly. Some thought him flustered, though others admired his “pithy, manly sentences.” On “this American business,” he promised to be “decisive, direct, and firm.” Extracting revenue from America was vital. So, too, was parliamentary supremacy. As for the Americans, “they have a right to every liberty which they can enjoy, consistent with the sovereignty and supremacy of this country.

“Let them be happy,” Germain added, in the tone of a man who cared not a whit for their happiness. “Nobody can wish them more so than I do.” He continued:

What I have always held, I now stand in office to maintain. To the questions, what force is necessary? What do you mean to send? I answer … such forces as are necessary to restore, maintain, and establish the power of this country in America, will not be wanting.… If they persist in their appeal to force, the force of the country must be exerted. The spirit of this country will go along with me in that idea, to suppress, to crush such rebellious resistance.

Just before four a.m., after fourteen hours of debate, Burke’s proposal was defeated, two to one. “Pity me, encourage me,” Germain told a friend, “and I will do my best.”

“Some fall so hard, they bound and rise again,” the ubiquitous Walpole observed. Such had been the fate of George Germain, born George Sackville, the youngest son of a duke. He was among Britain’s most controversial public men of the eighteenth century—esteemed, disgraced, rehabilitated, and raised to high office only to tumble once again. Named for his godfather, George I, and raised in a Kent palace with fifty-two staircases and 365 rooms, he had attended Trinity College in Dublin, said to be “half bear-garden and half brothel,” while his father served as lord lieutenant of Ireland. Ambitious and clever, he was an engaging conversationalist who retailed indiscreet stories of the royal family; his fluency in French reputedly put a serrated edge on his English irony. In either language he had a mordant wit, once telling a supplicant, “I find myself debarred the satisfaction of contributing to your happiness and ease.” Diligent, capable, and a deft debater, Sackville kept a large library of books he tended not to read, claiming, “I have not genius sufficient for works of mere imagination.” Married in 1754—his wife called him “my dearest man”—he proved a good father to five children even as tales circulated of his flagrant homosexuality, both a sin and a capital crime in his day.

He found his calling as a soldier, demonstrating what one admirer called “cannon-proof courage.” At the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, he was so far forward in the fighting that after he was shot in the chest his wounds were dressed in the French king’s tent. A year later he pursued Scottish clansmen through the Highlands after their defeat at Culloden, and in 1758, at St. Malo during the Seven Years’ War, he was again wounded while fighting the French. “Nobody stood higher,” Walpole wrote, “nobody has more ambition or more sense.”

Then came the great fall. On August 1, 1759, Lieutenant General Sackville was the senior commander of British forces serving in a coalition army when thirty-seven thousand allied troops battled forty-four thousand Frenchmen near the north German village of Minden. Subordinate to Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, a man he disliked and distrusted, Sackville failed to move with alacrity when ordered to fling his twenty-four cavalry squadrons against the faltering enemy. The French were defeated anyway, suffering seven thousand casualties in four hours. But they had not been routed. Ferdinand blamed Sackville for the blemished triumph, and a British captain denounced him as a “damned chicken-hearted … stinking coward.”

Recalled to London, smeared by Grub Street newspapers, Sackville appeared before a court-martial board of fifteen generals to argue that Ferdinand’s instructions had been ambiguous and contradictory, that bad terrain had impeded the cavalry, and that only eight minutes had been lost before his reinforcements joined the fight. No matter: he was convicted of disobeying orders and declared “unfit to serve His Majesty in any military capacity whatever.” The court fell just short of the two-thirds majority required to execute him. His vindictive monarch, George II, rubbed salt in the wound by ordering the verdict to be written in every regimental orderly book and read out on parade. He was burned in effigy at least once. To his brother-in-law he wrote, “I must live in hopes of better times.”

Those times began a few months later when the old king fell dead of a heart attack while sipping morning chocolate on his toilet, to be succeeded by his grandson, George III, who admired Sackville and permitted him to kiss the new monarch’s hand. The stain of disgrace proved indelible but not disqualifying. In 1765, Sackville gained readmission to the Privy Council, and in 1769 a widowed, childless cousin left him her fortune and estate in Northamptonshire on the condition that he perpetuate her surname. And so, resurrected, he became Lord George Germain. On Sunday mornings, a friend wrote, “he marched out his whole family in grand cavalcade to his parish church,” prepared to upbraid any chorister who sang a false note—“Out of tune, Tom Baker!”—while dispensing sixpence to poor children from his waistcoat pocket. “In punctuality, precision, dispatch, and integrity, he was not to be surpassed,” one associate wrote. Another observed simply, “There was no trash in his mind.”

He completed his rehabilitation by hewing to Crown policy, particularly in aligning himself with ministry hard-liners on colonial matters. A “riotous rabble” was to blame in America, he had told the Commons a year earlier, people who ought “not trouble themselves with politics and government which they do not understand.” He was said by one acolyte to have “all the requisites of a great minister, unless popularity and good luck are to be numbered among them.” North was happy enough to have a brawler at his elbow on the Treasury bench. Though neither held the other in affection—Germain privately called North “a trifling supine minister”—they shared the king’s conviction that defeat in America spelled the end of empire, as the historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy later wrote.

The backbiting never ceased, of course. In the tony men’s clubs around St. James’s he was still “Lord Minden” or the “Minden buggering hero.” One witticism held that should the British Army be forced to flee on the battlefield, Germain was the perfect man to lead a retreat. If convivial in private over a glass of claret, in public his mien hardened. Some found him dogmatic, aloof, “quite as cold in his manner as a minister needed be,” in a subordinate’s estimation. A clergyman described “a reserve and haughtiness in Lord George’s manner, which depressed and darkened all that was agreeable and engaging in him.” One biographer later posited that it was “his pride, his remoteness, his intransigence, his indifference, his irony, his disdain, his self-command and self-assurance that inflamed mean minds.”

Even those who felt no rancor toward Germain greeted his appointment with skepticism. He had been accused of many things over the years, with more epithets to come, but no one had ever charged him with statesmanship. Not least among his ministerial challenges was the fact that more than a few of the men now leading the British Army in North America had served with him in the past, at least peripherally, including Howe, Clinton, and Carleton.

Despite the expanding war in the colonies, the American Department remained a modest enterprise. Bookcases, dusty cupboards, and desks upholstered with the usual green baize filled four large rooms on the second floor of the Treasury building in Whitehall. Maps of imperial and plantation geography hung on the white plaster walls. The staff comprised two deputies, a half dozen clerks to scribble dispatches and collate enclosures, a charwoman, and a porter whose apparent function was to make petitioners wait for hours before turning them away completely. The office could draw from a government pool of three dozen messengers, but Germain asked that couriers too obese to ride horseback faster than five miles an hour travel instead by coach. As secretary he was paid just under £2,000 annually, although various perquisites nearly tripled the salary, notably the £5 allotment from every fee paid on various documents signed by the king, including military commissions, licenses to sell trees, and appointments at King’s College in New York. He also was entitled to £3,000 in secret service funds, plus a thousand ounces of white plate. The £13 paid for an office clock—he was uncommonly punctual—and two books of maps came from his private purse.

Germain believed that hard work could heal most ills, and he threw himself into his new role with vigor: issuing commands, rifling through official papers, scratching missives in his jagged, runic hand, the precise time always affixed on his letters to the king. He had long argued that “natural sloth” impeded British administration, especially in the thicket of bureaucracies and office fiefdoms now entangled with centuries of inertia and bad habits. Good habits could help revive efficiency. An admirer described Germain’s executive style as “rapid, yet clear and accurate.… There was no obscurity and ambiguity in his compositions.” His task would be herculean—to direct the longest, largest expeditionary war Britain had ever fought, concocting an effective counterinsurgency strategy while coordinating troops, shipping, naval escorts, and provisions. The small details alone were bewildering. Might the army in Boston want several dozen Tower wall-pieces that could throw a two-ounce ball five hundred yards with precision? When should six thousand new muskets be shipped to Quebec and Virginia? By what means? Were the lower decks in leased Dutch transport ships properly scuttled to avoid suffocating the horses headed across the Atlantic?

Upon arriving at Whitehall in mid-November, Germain found only bad news from America. Several dozen letters from royal governors in the southern colonies showed that the Crown’s efforts to punish Massachusetts had transformed New England grievances into continental resentments. The southern governors believed themselves vulnerable to rude treatment if not assassination, and most had abandoned their capitals for the sanctuary of British warships. “A motley mob … inflamed with liquor” had chased Governor Josiah Martin from his palace in North Carolina. In South Carolina, where rebels had amassed “great quantities of warlike stores,” Governor William Campbell wrote from the man-of-war Cherokee, “I fear it is forgot that His Majesty has any dominions in this part of America.” Official dispatches and other royal mail had been stolen in Florida. Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, had fled from Williamsburg. “My clerk,” he wrote, “is prisoner.” Governor James Wright in Georgia seemed especially rattled. “Liberty gentlemen” had pilfered six tons of his gunpowder and snatched his mail. “I begin to think a King’s governor has little or no business here,” he reported. Rebels in Savannah, he added, included “a parcel of the lowest people, chiefly carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, etc., with a Jew at their head.” Wright’s dispatches grew increasingly frantic. “No troops, no money, no orders or instructions, and a wild multitude gathering fast,” he added. “What can a man do in such a situation?”

Reports from the northern colonies were just as disheartening. A naval captain in Rhode Island wrote of “rebels coming in shoals, armed with muskets, bayonets, sticks and stones,” yelling, “Kill the Tories!” Only a Royal Navy threat to put every insurgent to the sword had restored calm. A Connecticut clergyman warned that malice “against the loyalists is so great and implacable that we fear a general massacre.” Governor John Wentworth had retreated to Boston after a mob demolished his New Hampshire house. In New York, Governor William Tryon had been chased to the Duchess of Gordon in the East River, and the loyal president of King’s College had fled all the way to England. When regulars also boarded ships for safety, rebels ransacked their baggage, looted an ordnance magazine, and made off with shore guns from the batteries in lower Manhattan. “The Americans,” Tryon warned, “from politicians are now becoming soldiers.”

Germain found broad agreement in the government on Britain’s strategic objective—to restore the rebellious colonies to their previous imperial subservience—but disagreement on how best to achieve that goal. How to defeat an enemy that lacked a conventional center of gravity, like a capital city, and relied on armed civilians who were said to be “deep into principles”? Should British forces hunt down and destroy rebel forces in the thirteen colonies and Canada? Strangle the colonies with a naval blockade? Divide and conquer by isolating either New England or the southern colonies? Hold New York City while subduing the affluent middle colonies between Virginia and New Jersey?

Lord North and some others in the cabinet now inclined toward a land rather than a naval war in hopes that it would be quicker, cheaper, and less provocative to the French. Such a strategy would also give greater succor to American loyalists, whom most British officials, Germain among them, still believed constituted a colonial majority. Yet doubts persisted. “The Americans may be reduced by the fleet,” Secretary at War Barrington had written North, “but never can be by the army.” A War Office report warned that fewer than ten thousand regulars in the British Isles could be spared for overseas duty. Given the booming economy, no more than six thousand more were likely to be recruited in time for the 1776 campaign. “Unless it rains men in red coats,” a British official wrote, “I know not where we are to get all we shall want.” Seventeen recruiting parties in Ireland were enlisting only one or two dozen men per week, combined. “This will never do,” wrote General Harvey, the adjutant general. “We are dribletting away the army, & to no purpose.”

Germain soon encountered other aggravations. Army recruiters competed with the Royal Navy and the East India Company for men. A dozen departments administered the army and overseas military logistics, with fitful coordination, when not outright rivalry, among them. Shipwrights resisting new efficiency rules had gone on strike, bringing Portsmouth and most other yards to a standstill; almost 130 were fired, hampering ship construction and repair. Too often the king and his men were forced to make crucial decisions in the dark, or at least the dusk. Voyages from England to America usually took ten weeks, though sometimes fifteen or more; return trips with the prevailing winds typically required six weeks. A minister might wait four months for acknowledgment that his instructions had been received, or he might wait forever: forty packet boats carrying the Royal Mail would be captured or founder in storms during the war. Misunderstanding, misinformation, and untimely orders were inevitable, particularly when London relied on such flawed sources of intelligence as loyalists desperate for Crown support and royal governors banished from their own capitals. “America,” General Harvey said, “is an ugly job.”

Like the man he called “the mildest and best of kings,” Germain often invoked the need for “zeal.” Sensing that the Americans had advantages of time and space, he vowed to bring “the utmost force of this kingdom to finish the rebellion in one campaign” before other European powers could intervene to aid the rebels. If the insurrection was to be crushed in 1776, half measures would never do.

Zeal could be found in the Prohibitory Act, introduced in the Commons by North on November 20. All vessels found trading with the Americans “shall be forfeited to His Majesty, as if the same were the ships and effects of open enemies.” Cargoes taken on the high seas would be considered lawful seizures. Captured American mariners could be pressed into the Royal Navy. American ports were to be blockaded. The act amounted to “a declaration of perpetual war,” one British politician observed, although John Adams would call it an “act of independency” that galvanized American resistance. Parliament overwhelmingly approved the measure, and the king gave his assent on December 22. The king also had approved the Admiralty’s plan to recall Admiral Graves in hopes that his replacement, Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, a former governor of Newfoundland, would put a spark into the North American squadron.

As for fighting the rebels on land, Germain relied heavily on General Howe’s assessment. An unconventional enemy required original tactics, and Howe’s experience with light infantry and irregular warfare—fighting from “trees, walls, or hedges”—seemed apposite. The commanding general favored squeezing New England between the blockaded ports and the North River, also known as the Hudson, with an offensive launched into New York from Canada once the American interlopers were expelled from Quebec. Germain agreed: a robust fleet must be dispatched to the St. Lawrence, and another to Boston or New York. He immediately pressed the Admiralty to find sufficient ships not only in Britain, but also in Germany and Holland. More combat troops must also be found, from Scotland, Ireland, and the little German principalities.

Germain also knew that for the past two months, the king had been intimately involved in planning another expedition—to the southern colonies, where Scottish émigrés in North Carolina were “said to be well inclined” to the Crown. Within three days of taking office, Germain had adopted this adventure as his own. On the king’s command, seven infantry regiments were to embark in Cork on December 1, with orders “to assist in the suppression of the rebellion.” By late November, His Majesty was informed that Howe and the southern governors had been given authority to raise loyalist troops who would receive British arms and be paid as much as regulars. A commodore, the capable Sir Peter Parker, would escort the expedition to the southern colonies with nine warships and fifteen hundred crewmen. The Admiralty ordered Hawke to Cape Fear on the North Carolina coast to recruit local pilots—with press warrants, if necessary—and to scout for landing sites.

All this was to be “a profound secret,” although, as usual, American agents in London learned of the plan immediately. An assault on the southern colonies would hardly come as a surprise. A recent proposal in the Commons—rejected for the moment—called for sending British regiments to foment slave uprisings, and Governor Dunmore in Virginia had declared that “it is my fixed purpose to arm all my own Negroes and receive all others that will come to me whom I shall declare free.”

Zeal, indeed, would be a hallmark of George Germain’s ministry. More aggressive than his generals, he intended to send them even more reinforcements than they had requested. Howe, facing a grim winter in Boston, praised “the decisive and masterly strokes … effected since your lordship has assumed the conduct of this war.” The American secretary’s moxie was so striking that even the opposition Evening Post predicted he would rise still further in his remarkable rebound to eventually become prime minister. The king was said to be pleased.

Yet amid the green baize desks and the exquisite wall maps in Whitehall, certain truths about the American war remained elusive. Neither Germain nor anyone else in government had carefully analyzed whether Britain’s troop transports, storeships, men-of-war, and other maritime resources could support an ambitious campaign that now included ancillary assaults in the far south and the far north. Little coordination was imposed on one commander in chief in Canada or another in Boston, or with their naval counterparts. Subordinate generals were permitted, even encouraged, to offer their views directly to policy makers in London. Swayed by loyalist exiles and vindictive Crown officials in the colonies, king and cabinet continued to overestimate the breadth and depth of loyal support. No coherent plan obtained to woo the tens of thousands who straddled the fence in America, or to protect those who rejected insurrection but risked severe retaliation from the rebels.

Finally, Germain, like the best of kings he served, could neither grasp the coherence and appeal of revolutionary ideals, nor comprehend the historical headwinds against which Britain now tacked. The American secretary’s lack of “genius sufficient for works of mere imagination” had been acknowledged ironically; that irony would haunt the rest of his days. For now, in a private letter to Howe, he praised the “cordiality & harmony which subsists between you, Clinton, & Burgoyne.” He added:

We want some good news to encourage us to go with the immense expense attending this war.… The providing [of] armies at such a distance is a most difficult undertaking. I do the best I can, and then we must trust to Providence for success.

7.
They Fought, Bled, and Died Like Englishmen

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, DECEMBER 1775

John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and the royal governor of Virginia, had few rivals as the most detested British official in North America. Now forty-five, he was a short, pugnacious Scot whose father had been arrested for treason in the 1745 Jacobite rising. Young John subsequently chose to serve the English Crown as a soldier and was permitted to inherit the title after his father’s death in 1756. His estates in Perthshire provided £3,000 annually, but the fourth earl had accumulated both eleven children and expensive tastes. He hired the eminent artist Joshua Reynolds to paint his portrait, in tam-o’-shanter and highland tartans; he also built a summer house with an enormous stone cupola shaped like a pineapple, later derided as “the most bizarre building in Scotland.” Finding himself in financial straits, Dunmore sought to enlarge his fortune abroad. Appointed governor of New York in 1770, he had no sooner arrived than London reassigned him to Virginia, a disappointment that sent him stumbling through Manhattan streets in a drunken rage, roaring, “Damn Virginia … I’d asked for New York.” One loyalist reflected, “Was there ever such a blockhead?”

Virginians later caricatured Dunmore as an inebriated, arrogant philanderer, but he brought to Williamsburg one of America’s largest libraries, an art collection, and assorted musical instruments as evidence of his refinement. He also brought an unquenchable appetite for land, claiming vast tracts between Lake Champlain and what would become Indiana. His popularity surged briefly in 1774 after he launched a punitive military expedition against Shawnee Indians inconvenient to white Virginians who also coveted western acreage. But revolutionary upheaval soon unhorsed him.

Ever since John Rolfe, husband of a young Indian woman named Pocahontas—renamed Rebecca after her conversion to Christianity—learned to cure native tobacco in the early seventeenth century, the crop had dominated Virginia’s economy. The thirty-five thousand tons exported annually from the colony by the early 1770s had brought wealth but also more than £1 million in debt, nearly equal to that of the other colonies combined and often incurred by Tidewater planters living beyond their means. Agents for Glasgow and London merchant houses now controlled most of the tobacco yield. Resentment against British imperial constrictions combined with other colonial grievances, and was compounded by anxiety over the loss of local autonomy. Rebel leaders persuaded Virginians that rebellion “would enhance their opportunities and status,” the historian Alan Taylor later wrote, while also safeguarding political liberties threatened by an overbearing mother country. Planter aristocrats—like the Washingtons, Lees, and Randolphs—helped lead the uprising, but only by common consent. Moreover, evangelical churches, notably the Baptists and Methodists, were promised elevated standing “by disestablishing the elitist Anglican Church” favored by Crown loyalists.

When, in May 1774, Dunmore dissolved the fractious Virginia assembly, the House of Burgesses, delegates simply moved down the street from the capitol to reconvene in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, subsequently forming the Virginia Convention to oversee colonial affairs. Anger deepened; resistance grew general. The colony became a leader in boycotting British goods and in summoning the Continental Congress to Philadelphia. Courts closed. Militia companies drilled. The Virginia Gazette published the names of loyalists considered hostile to liberty; some were ordered into western exile or to face the confiscation of their estates. “Lower-class men who did not own property saw the break from Britain as a chance to gain land and become slaveholders,” the historian Michael Kranish would write.

Baffled by Virginians’ “blind and unreasoning fury,” Dunmore brooded in his palace. He peppered London with complaints and with unreliable appraisals of colonial politics, receiving little guidance in return. In April 1775, even before learning of events in Lexington and Concord, he ordered a marine detachment to confiscate gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg on grounds that “the Negroes might have seized upon it.” Rebel drums beat and militia “shirtmen”—so named for their distinctive hunting garb—threatened “to seize upon or massacre me,” he told Whitehall. After reimbursing the rebels £330 for the powder he had impounded, in early June he fled with his family in the dark of night for refuge first aboard the Magdalen, then on the Fowey, and eventually on the Eilbeck, an unrigged merchant tub he renamed for himself. With his wife and children dispatched to Britain, Dunmore’s dominion was reduced to a gaggle of loyalist merchants, clerks, and scrofulous sailors. Still, with just a few hundred more troops, he wrote London in August, “I could reduce the colony to submission.”

The Gazette would accuse him of “crimes that would even have disgraced the noted pirate Blackbeard.” Most of his felonies involved what were derided as “chicken-stealing expeditions” against coastal plantations, although he also impounded a Norfolk printing press from a seditious publisher who dared suggest that Catholic blood ran through Dunmore’s veins.

But then the earl decided to become an emancipator.

Roughly five hundred thousand Americans were black, some 20 percent of the population, and nine in ten of those blacks were slaves. In southern colonies, the proportion of blacks to whites was much higher: 40 percent of Virginia’s half million people were of African descent—often from cultures with military traditions—and white fear of slave revolts was a prominent reason for keeping colonial militias in fighting trim. Many white masters were reluctant to allow missionaries to convert their chattel for fear that radical Christian notions would make them even less docile. Political turmoil in America gave some slaves hope, and for months runaway blacks had sought protection from the regulars in a belief that British views on slavery differed markedly from those of southern planters.

In truth, although slavery had begun to disappear in England and Wales, Britain’s colonial economy was built on a scaffold of bondage. Among many examples, the almost two hundred thousand slaves in Jamaica outnumbered whites fifteen to one, and an uprising in 1760 had been suppressed by shooting several hundred blacks. The slave trade, carried largely in British ships, had never been more prosperous than in the years just before the American rebellion, and Britain would remain the world’s foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century.

Dunmore’s initial muttering to London in the early summer about emancipation was largely a bluff. He recognized that bound labor was critical to the white commonwealth he governed. The king’s government was unenthusiastic about wrecking colonial economies or encouraging slave revolts that might infect the West Indies. But by mid-fall Dunmore was desperate to regain the initiative in Virginia. Reinforced with a few dozen 14th Foot soldiers who’d arrived from St. Augustine, he launched several aggressive Tidewater raids, capturing or destroying seventy-seven rebel guns “without the smallest opposition,” as a British captain wrote General Howe on November 1, “which is proof that it would not require a very large force to subdue this colony.” Raising the king’s standard—unable to find British national colors, Dunmore settled for a regimental banner—he administered loyalty oaths to those who pinned on strips of red cloth as a badge of “true allegiance to his sacred Majesty George III.” The price of red fabric rose in Norfolk stores, reflecting demand.

On November 7, using his confiscated printing press, Dunmore declared martial law and issued a proclamation: “I do hereby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty’s troops as soon as may be.” Liberation applied only to the able-bodied slaves of his foes. There would be no deliverance for his own fifty-seven slaves—abandoned in Williamsburg when he fled and for whom he would claim compensation from the government—nor would loyalists’ chattel be freed. The governor intended to crush a rebellion, not reconfigure the social order.

Still, eager blacks found their way into his ranks. Fitted by the British with linen or sail-canvas shirts, often with the motto “LIBERTY TO SLAVES” across their chests, runaways with names like Sampson, Pompey, and Glasgow were formed into an “Ethiopian Regiment,” under white officers. Maryland patriots tried to bar correspondence with Virginia in a futile effort to prevent news of Dunmore’s gambit from spreading north. A Philadelphian wrote, “The flame runs like wild fire through the slaves.” British sailors in cutters raided riverside plantations in “Negro-catching” forays. On November 14, Dunmore personally led a detachment of Ethiopians, regulars, marines, and twenty Scottish clerks in a rout of Virginia shirtmen at Kemp’s Landing, southeast of Norfolk. The Americans loosed a volley or two before fleeing, their leaders reportedly “whipping up their horses” except for those too drunk to ride.

The small victory was good for recruiting both white loyalists—Dunmore boasted that three thousand men had joined him—and black runaways, who, he reported, “are flocking in.” The governor triumphantly marched into Norfolk on November 23. Many Tidewater loyalists publicly revealed their sympathies, and some avowed patriots retreated to the safer ground of neutrality. “This pink-cheeked time-server,” as the historian Simon Schama called Dunmore, “had become the patriarch of a great black exodus.” Thomas Jefferson would later claim that from Virginia alone tens of thousands of slaves escaped servitude during the war, a number likely inflated but suggestive of white anxiety.

“With our little corps I think we have done wonders,” Dunmore wrote Howe on November 30. “Had I but a few more men here, I would immediately march to Williamsburg … by which I should soon compel the whole colony to submit.” Norfolk possessed a fine harbor that “could supply your army and navy with every necessary of life,” if properly protected. His senior naval officer added in a dispatch from the Otter on December 2 that the Americans, “from their being such cowards and cold weather coming on,” were expected to remain quiet through the winter.

That was unlikely. Dunmore had miscalculated: rather than cowing white southerners and pressuring slave owners to remain loyal, he would unify Virginians as never before. An American letter written on December 6 and subsequently published in a London newspaper captured the prevailing sentiment: “Hell itself could not have vomited anything more black than his design of emancipating our slaves.”

The proclamation backfired throughout the South, even though many runaways from Georgia to Mount Vernon eventually made their way to coastal waters wherever British men-of-war appeared. Rumors spread that slaves who murdered their masters would be entitled to their estates. The lawyer Patrick Henry, whose recent demand “Give me liberty or give me death” clearly did not countenance “black banditti,” circulated copies of Dunmore’s announcement in order to inflame white slave owners. For many, a war about political rights now became an existential struggle to prevent the social fabric from unraveling. Even Piedmont yeomen whose slave holdings were limited to renting a field hand or two took offense. Edward Rutledge, a prominent South Carolina politician, wrote in December that arming freed slaves tended “more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”

The Virginia Gazette urged slaves to “obey your masters … and expect a better condition in the next world.” Another, more sinister article warned, “Whether we suffer or not, if you desert us, you most certainly will.” A British official in Annapolis wrote, “This measure of emancipating the Negroes has excited a universal ferment, and will, I apprehend, greatly strengthen the general confederacy.” “Devil Dunmore” was vilified as “that ignoramus Negro-thief.” Had the British “searched through the world for a person the best fitted to ruin their cause,” wrote Richard Henry Lee, “they could not have found a more complete agent than Lord Dunmore.”

No slave master was more incensed than General Washington. “That arch traitor to the rights of humanity, Lord Dunmore, should be instantly crushed, if it takes the force of the whole colony to do it,” he wrote. In another outburst from Cambridge, Washington told Lee, “Nothing less than depriving him of life or liberty will secure peace in Virginia.” Otherwise, the governor “will become the most formidable enemy America has.”

A chance to confront the “Negro-thief” soon occurred twelve miles south of Norfolk at Great Bridge, on the rutted road from Carolina. Here two-wheeled carts brought cypress shingles and barreled turpentine from the Great Dismal Swamp, and drovers guided their flocks and herds to Tidewater slaughterhouses. A hamlet of twenty structures dominated by a church stood near the south branch of the Elizabeth River, which was spanned by a trestle bridge forty yards long and approached by long plank causeways through the marshlands. “Nine-tenths of the people are Tories,” one Virginian reported, “who are the poorest, miserable wretches I ever saw.” Just north of this settlement, Dunmore, exhbiting what a later commentator called “his characteristic unwisdom,” had built an earthen fort with two 4-pounders to command the bridge and a wooden stockade to house a garrison of a hundred regulars and Ethiopians. He named the fort for himself, but rebel shirtmen called it the Hog Pen.

By Friday, December 8, more than seven hundred militiamen had gathered a quarter mile south of the Hog Pen. A zigzag breastwork, seven feet high with fire steps and gun loopholes, served as their redoubt. Their numbers included the 2nd Virginia Regiment, commanded by Colonel William Woodford, a French and Indian War veteran. A Culpeper minute company carried a flag displaying a coiled rattlesnake and the motto “DON’T TREAD ON ME”; in their ranks marched a rangy, twenty-year-old lieutenant named John Marshall, who one day would be chief justice of the Supreme Court. The western riflemen typically wore deerskin trousers and leaf-dyed hunting shirts, with a buck’s tail affixed to the hat and a scalping knife sheathed on the belt. Many had “liberty or death” printed in large white script over their hearts, although one young rifleman admitted to preferring “liberty or wounded.”

Skirmishers and raiding parties from both sides had exchanged potshots for a week, burning isolated houses to discourage snipers. Some rebel officers wanted to execute captured slaves but agreed to leave their fate to the convention in Williamsburg. Dunmore, who remained aboard his floating headquarters near Norfolk, may have been duped by an American deserter who claimed that the rebels had fewer than three hundred men; he may also have learned, correctly, that more rebels were en route from Williamsburg and North Carolina. The governor dispatched additional regulars to Great Bridge, along with British sailors and loyalist volunteers, bringing the force there to perhaps four hundred. With more impetuous unwisdom, he also ordered the garrison to leave the secure fort and attack the American fortifications before they could be reinforced.

At first light on Saturday, December 9, reveille drums woke the American camp only to be answered with a snicker of musketry from the northern causeway approaching the bridge. The firing at first seemed like “our usual sport—an exchange of a few morning guns,” one Virginian wrote. But moments later Colonel Woodford’s adjutant called, “Boys, stand to your arms!” Bullets whistled overhead, and sentries spotted redcoats replacing planks missing from the bridge stringers. British gunners muscled the two 4-pounders from inside the fort and lobbed several rounds toward the American lines. The damp morning thickened with shouts and smoke and the booming cannonade. Lieutenant Edward Travis led an American skirmish line of eighty militiamen to the breastwork, 160 yards below the bridge, while Woodford deployed his main force around the church a quarter mile to the south.

Through smoke and morning haze, grenadiers abruptly appeared on the causeway, six abreast in bearskin caps and red coats with buff facings. With bayonets glinting and two drums beating time, they tramped in parade order across the bridge, shoes clapping the wooden planks. At the head of the column was a tall, homely captain named Charles Fordyce, who had written a friend a week earlier that “a couple of thousand men would settle everything here in the course of this winter.” On this morning, at this place, Captain Fordyce had not a couple thousand but 120 regulars, trailed at a safe distance by a scruffy battalion of marines, sailors, volunteers, and liberty-to-slaves Ethiopians. Within fifty yards of the breastwork, Fordyce waved his hat in a gesture of encouragement and was heard to cry, “The day is our own!”

Those were his last coherent words. On order, Travis’s men rose up from behind their barricade, took aim, and fired. Lead and flame leaped from the top of the parapet to gall the British column. Fordyce fell with a bullet in the knee. Blotting at the wound with a handkerchief pulled from his cuff, he rose, hobbled forward, and fell again, a few paces from the rebel barrier; fourteen bullets would be counted in his corpse. More gunshots came from the American left, where Culpeper riflemen, Lieutenant Marshall among them, had flanked the bridge along a marsh hummock and now enfiladed the enemy column with cross fire. Volley upon volley blistered the grenadier ranks. “For God’s sake,” a voice shrieked, “do not murder us!”

The rear guard turned and pelted for the fort. Gunners spiked their 4-pounders by hammering nails into the touchholes; then they ran, too. Grenadiers dragged wounded comrades across the bridge, glancing over their shoulders; shirtmen were said to favor scalping. “We retreated with much fewer brave fellows than we took out,” a midshipman from the Otter later wrote. Breathless bodies lay scattered before the breastwork like bloody throw rugs. “They fought, bled, and died like Englishmen,” reported Captain Richard Kidder Meade of the 2nd Virginia. “Ten and twelve bullets through many. Limbs broke in two or three places. Brains turning out. Good God, what a sight!” The entire action, from reveille to retreat, had lasted half an hour, “an absurd, ridiculous & unnecessary attack,” a surviving British officer wrote home.

Thirty-three captured loyalists and reenslaved Ethiopians were handcuffed, black to white, for the march to Williamsburg jail cells. Woodford agreed to return the British dead and wounded under a truce flag. A list recorded the casualties by infirmity: “ball lodged in the leg, no fracture,” or “ball lodged in the bowels, judged mortal.” One corporal was reportedly still alive despite seventeen wounds. American losses amounted to one man nicked in the finger.

That night at seven p.m., after loading the wounded into wagons and carts, the British garrison crept from the fort and trudged toward Norfolk, five hours north. On Sunday morning, shirtmen found the Hog Pen empty but for a few axes, twenty-nine spades, eleven pairs of shoes, a pair of snuff boxes, and dead grenadiers, now stiff and stripped of their coats and waistcoats. Dunmore’s report to London would list seventeen killed and forty-nine wounded, but that excluded blacks and loyalists, who brought the total casualties to more than a hundred.

“His Lordship,” one British officer wrote, “has much to answer for.”

Norfolk might be a “dirty little borough,” in Governor Dunmore’s description, but it was Virginia’s major port as well as the colony’s biggest town, with six thousand residents. Fine houses owned by ship captains and tobacco factors faced the waterfront, and brick warehouses crowded the wharves. Waters converged here: the James and Elizabeth Rivers, the Chesapeake Bay, and, beyond Capes Henry and Charles, the briny deep. Before the war strangled much of the colony’s trade, rum, sugar, and European finery—linens, chafing dishes, pewter porringers—were hoisted from the holds of arriving ships, which then were loaded with timber, wheat, salt pork, and countless hogsheads of sweet-scented tobacco. Sailmakers patched canvas shredded in rough crossings, and lighters with bubbling kettles of tar glided through the shallows, carrying carpenters hired to repair leaky merchantmen. An annual fair in Market Square featured bullbaiting and a contest to see who could snatch a gold-laced cap from a greased pole. Fine fiddling might be heard at dances in Masons Hall. The town was despised by many Virginians as a haven for British mercantilists and their Tory collaborators. Yet in better days, Norfolk had flourished.

Those days were gone, and the town’s worst days had now arrived. Upon hearing of the defeat at Great Bridge, Dunmore raved incoherently, threatening to hang the boy who brought the news. The bedraggled column of survivors shuffled through Norfolk’s cobblestoned streets in the small hours of Sunday morning, December 10. The wounded pleaded for water, and women with pitchers moved among them as the uninjured regulars and Ethiopians marched to the docks to be rowed out to half a dozen ships; Dunmore believed the town indefensible. Some loyalist families soon followed, clutching a few treasured possessions, but much of the population, foreseeing trouble, fled inland or up Tidewater creeks. Men dashed about trying to hire horses and wagons, or at least drays and wheelbarrows. House slaves piled beds, mahogany tables, chairs, and a bit of salt meat onto each conveyance, and off they went, to Portsmouth, or Suffolk, or even the Carolinas, abandoning those handsome homes on Church and Talbot Streets. To bolster their spirits, some could be heard singing as they hurried down Princess Anne Road.

The rebel force, swollen to almost thirteen hundred, had moved toward Norfolk. Woodford yielded command to Colonel Robert Howe, a more senior officer who had brought reinforcements from North Carolina. By Thursday, December 14, the rebels occupied the town, sniping at British vessels and arresting a hundred suspected loyalists for interrogation in Williamsburg. “We have taken up some of the Tories and coupled them to a Negro with handcuffs,” one officer reported. “The most stupid kind we discharge.”

Dunmore was also reinforced with the arrival, on December 21, of the Liverpool after a miserable fourteen-week passage from Britain that had reduced the twenty-eight-gun frigate to a single cask of fetid water. Scurvy plagued the ship and her companion, the ordnance brig Maria. But when Liverpool’s captain, Henry Bellew, demanded fresh provisions for his crews, rebel riflemen replied with more gunfire. American sentries paraded along the waterfront, yelled taunts from the docks, and seized a brig loaded with salt, the price of which had soared from one shilling per bushel to fifteen. “They have nothing more at heart than the utter destruction of this once most flourishing country,” Dunmore wrote London.

By December 31, both the year and British patience had expired. Captain Bellew sent Colonel Howe an odd ultimatum: that “you will cause your sentinels in the town of Norfolk to avoid being seen.” American gibes persisted—“every mark of insult,” Bellew complained, including insolent sentries walking with “their hats fixed on their bayonets” for sure visibility from his quarterdeck. Bellew moored Kingfisher, Otter, and Liverpool, the three largest men-of-war, with their gun ports broadside to the waterfront. Jack pendants flew from the bowsprits to distinguish these vessels from merchantmen. Dunmore warned civilians loitering in Norfolk to get out.

After a minatory rattle of drums, Liverpool fired the first three cannonballs, at three p.m. on Monday, January 1, demolishing a wharf shack used for a guardhouse. Within moments more than a hundred guns lacerated the town, pummeling the warehouses and dockyards in an effort to chivy snipers from their nests. Dirty smoke draped the anchorage as boatloads of British troops rowed ashore to set more fires. Storerooms of pitch and turpentine blazed up, igniting large houses and humble shanties alike. By ten p.m. a crimson glow hung like a halo over the waterfront. “The wind favored their design,” Colonels Howe and Woodford wrote in a joint dispatch to authorities in Williamsburg, “and we believe the flames will become general.” In a separate note, Howe described “women and children running through a crowd of shot to get out of town.… A few have, I hear, been killed. Does it not call for vengeance, both from God and man?” A British midshipman wrote in the early hours of January 2, “The town is still burning, as it will be for three or four days.”

That was quite true, for vengeful shirtmen had picked up where British incendiaries left off, burning, looting, and filling their canteens with alcohol pinched from grogshops. “Keep up the jig” became a rallying cry for those determined to punish a Tory town and blame it on the enemy. A witness reported militiamen “drinking rum and crying out, ‘Let us make hay while the sun shines.’” Unrestrained by their officers—Howe and Woodford had been disingenuous, if not dishonest, in blaming only the British for the conflagration—they plundered warehouses and residences, selling booty on the streets. A young soldier in Hampton wrote his mother, “At night the fire was so great the clouds above the town appeared as red and bright as they do in an evening at sun setting.”

At length the flames subsided. Colonel Howe reported that Norfolk “is in a very ruinous condition.” But vengeance had not yet run its course. Paraphrasing the Roman war cry that baneful Carthage must be destroyed, Thomas Jefferson had declared, “Delenda est Norfolk.” The Virginia Convention agreed and “ordered the remains of Norfolk to be burnt,” a major told his wife. “We expect to see the blaze soon.” Officers banged on doors, ordering all remaining residents within a mile of the water to evacuate. Shirtmen soon rampaged through the town again, setting blazes to structures still standing on Bermuda, Catherine, and Church Streets.

“The detested town of Norfolk is no more!” a midshipman wrote. The “dirty little borough,” now reduced to ash and skeletal chimneys, had suffered greater damage than would befall any town in America during the Revolution. An investigative commission the following year found that of 1,331 structures destroyed in and near Norfolk, the British had demolished 32 before evacuating the town, then burned 19 more during the January 1 bombardment. Militia troops burned 863 in early January, and another 416 in the subsequent razing ordered by the convention. But that accounting remained secret for sixty years and then was buried in a legislative journal that stayed hidden for another century, as the historian John E. Selby would note. Blaming the redcoats for wanton destruction was convenient, and like ruined Falmouth in Maine or Charlestown in Massachusetts, Norfolk became a vivid emblem of British cruelty.

“Never can true reconcilement grow,” the Virginia Gazette declared, “where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.” The war had become both brutal and continental, from Montreal to southern Virginia, and would grow nastier and spread farther. Dunmore’s actions drew Virginia into the insurrection full-bore: in mid-January the Virginia Convention enlarged the two existing militia regiments and then created seven more, most of them commanded by officers who had served with Washington during the French war. All nine Virginia regiments would be mustered into the new Continental Army, which Washington was forming into a national force outside Boston, as ordered by Congress. The convention, in an act of independence, also declared Virginia ports open for trade to any nation except Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies.

Virginians got on with hunting their runaways. A notice in the Gazette offered a reward for “a servant boy named Bartholomew Archibald, about 18 years of age, about 5 feet 6 inches high, of a dark complexion, pitted with smallpox, very slim made.… I am apt to think he will pass for a free man.” Captured “renegadoes” who had served Dunmore were publicly flogged, occasionally after having an ear severed. Some were sold to sugar plantations in the West Indies or sent to work the lead mines in Fincastle County, digging ore for rebel bullets. One account reported that some blacks caught bearing arms for the British had their severed heads impaled on poles at crossroads. Owners were compensated for their losses.

By triggering Norfolk’s immolation, Dunmore had ruined his friends and deprived himself of sanctuary. American contempt for the governor only intensified. He was accused in the press of keeping two enslaved girls as “bedmakers,” and it was said that he had “barreled up some dead bodies of the smallpox and sent them on shore” to spread disease. Banished from both Williamsburg and Norfolk, he took refuge with a hodgepodge cluster of ninety vessels at Tucker’s Mill Point, a malarial spit on the west bank of the Elizabeth River. A six-foot breastwork and a ditch three hundred yards long protected a four-acre encampment where several wells were sunk for fresh water.

But rebel riflemen lurked on the perimeter, and jail fever—typhus—spread through both the Royal Navy crews and the refugees trapped in what was derisively called the “King’s Four Acres.” Grave mounds began to sprout on the riverbank, first a few, then a few score, and eventually a few hundred, half of them reportedly belonging to freed slaves. Moreover, Dunmore reported, “there was not a ship in the fleet that did not throw one, two, or three or more dead overboard every night.” Otter became a virtual ghost ship. Dunmore sent armed boats to forage for food along the coast with little success, even as additional runaways slipped into the camp each day. Bread and salt meat supplies began to dwindle, sickness grew epidemic, and soon enough, the governor knew, he would have to lead his wandering tribe elsewhere.

Dunmore poured out his troubles in an endless letter to London. “I wish to God it had been possible to have spared some troops for this colony,” he wrote. “I am now morally certain had I had 500 men here six weeks ago … [the rebels] would not have been able to raise any number that could possibly have opposed my march to any part of the colony.” Instead, the fate befallen the proud royal colony of Virginia “is a mortification.”

“God only knows,” he added, “what I have suffered.”

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