Bunker Hill

offers of accommodation” from the provincials. It was therefore time, he decided, to issue a proclamation instituting martial law in Massachusetts. Given Burgoyne’s reputation as a wordsmith, Gage requested that his old Westminster schoolmate ghostwrite a proclamation that offered clemency to all patriot leaders who promptly surrendered, with the exceptions of Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Written with an arrogant, overblown pomposity (at one point, Burgoyne ridiculed the provincials as rebels “who with a preposterous parade of military arrangement, affected to hold the army besieged”), the proclamation only strengthened the provincials’ resolve to oppose the ministry’s forces.
    When these three officers weren’t writing their friends and patrons back in England about the commander in chief’s incompetence and their own dismal prospects (Burgoyne complained of a “motionless, drowsy, irksome medium, or rather vacuum, too low for the honor of command, too high for that of execution”), they were in discussions with Gage about the best way to break out of their current dilemma. Howe, who was the senior of the major generals and could be expected to lead whatever plan was finally put into action, appears to have had a key role in coming up with a strategy that he, at least, felt could turn the tables on the provincial army. In a letter written on June 12 to his brother Richard, an admiral in the British navy, he outlined how it was to be done.
    On Sunday, June 18, when a significant portion of the provincial forces were attending religious services, Burgoyne would begin cannonading Roxbury from Boston Neck as Howe led a detachment to Dorchester Heights, to the east of Roxbury, and Clinton led the attack in “the center.” Once Howe had thrown together two redoubts on Dorchester Heights, he’d attack General Thomas’s army in Roxbury. As Thomas’s force fled in retreat, Howe would turn his attention to Charlestown on the other side of Boston. After he’d secured the hills overlooking that town, it was on to Cambridge. “I suppose the rebels will move from Cambridge,” he wrote his brother confidently, “and that we shall take and keep possession of it.”
    And so they agreed. In six days the British would break out of Boston and become the masters of Roxbury, Charlestown, and most important of all, Cambridge, the headquarters of the provincial army.
    —
    About the time Howe wrote his brother of their plan to move against the rebels, Joseph Warren set out in a small boat, its oars muffled so that he might row undetected past the many warships anchored between Charlestown and Boston. For the president of the Provincial Congress to be on a boat headed for the Boston waterfront was extremely ill advised, but Warren had spent the last sixty days putting himself at risk. Whether he was rallying the men at Menotomy, Grape Island, or Chelsea Creek, he had made sure to be wherever the danger was greatest. In addition to the musket-ball-whizzing thrills of the skirmishes, Warren had come to enjoy the daily hustle from one make-or-break meeting in the Provincial Congress or the Committee of Safety to another as all of Massachusetts wavered on the edge of chaos and confusion. Warren appears to have thrived under conditions that most found overwhelming. Indeed, his addictive love of life in the balance may have led him to carry on a dalliance with Sally Edwards even as he courted the woman who seems to have been his soul mate, Mercy Scollay. Now, in early June, not only his own life but the lives of everyone in New England were teetering on the brink, and Warren was in his element.
    So it should come as no surprise that on a night in the middle of June he was headed to a secret rendezvous in British-occupied Boston. Mitigating the risk was the location of the meeting at Hudson’s Point in the North End, described in a spy report to General Gage as “a nest of very wicked fellows, ship carpenters and caulkers” who used red signal flags to pass messages to the provincial troops on the other side of the harbor. Yet another spy report claimed that so many “rebels get out [of Boston] without passes” because the men who ran the two ferries that docked in the North End “let them go.” Given the alternatives, the North End was the safest portion of the Boston waterfront for a clandestine meeting.
    Warren needed a doctor to serve as the army’s surgeon general. Dr. Benjamin Church, now in Philadelphia,