Bunker Hill

on Dorchester Heights—the provincial army would seize the currently unoccupied high ground above Charlestown.
    —
    At 6:00 p.m. on Friday, June 16, about one thousand provincial soldiers under the command of Colonel William Prescott assembled on the common in Cambridge, opposite Hastings House—the headquarters of General Ward and the Committee of Safety. Clutching an odd assortment of muskets and dressed in homespun clothes with sweat-stained hats on their disheveled heads, they looked just like the militiamen who had fought at Lexington and Concord. The only difference was that after almost two months away from home, much of it spent digging fortifications and marching up and down Cambridge Common, they were much dirtier than the farmers who had rushed to action on April 19. None of them knew what lay ahead that night, but once they’d gathered around the Reverend Samuel Langdon in prayer and headed out toward Charlestown in the deepening dusk accompanied by a wagon full of entrenching tools and several horse-drawn fieldpieces, they must have known that they were about to get dirtier still.

    Soon after leaving Cambridge, they paused to meet up with about two hundred soldiers from Connecticut under the command of Captain Thomas Knowlton. At some point during the march, which took them past the common in Charlestown where the body of the slave Mark had once hung in chains, they were joined by General Israel Putnam. Also accompanying them was Lieutenant Colonel Richard Gridley, the noted engineer and commander of the artillery regiment.
    Soon they were crossing Charlestown’s narrow neck—only thirty feet wide in some places at high tide, with the Mystic River to their left and the shallows of a tidal mill pond to their right—before they mounted the gentle rise of Bunker Hill. They were without a moon that night, with only the stars to reveal the contours of the 110-foot-high hill that just two months before had provided General Percy’s men with the protection they so desperately needed on the evening of April 19. Gage had decided to abandon these heights, but not until after his engineer Captain John Montresor had thrown up a fortification, and this hastily built, arrow-shaped wall still stood on the rounded and otherwise empty summit of Bunker Hill.
    Colonel Prescott’s orders told him to fortify this hill, which overlooked the roads from Cambridge to the west and from Medford to the north, as well as the waters of the Mystic River to the east. A fort built here would go a long way to stymieing a British attempt to take Charlestown to the south and then Cambridge. What’s more, the British had given Colonel Gridley a head start by constructing a defensive wall. And since it was already well past 10:00 p.m. when they reached the heights overlooking Charlestown, with dawn set to arrive a little past 4:00 a.m., time was of the essence if they were to have any chance of building a fort before the morning light revealed their efforts to the British in Boston.
    But instead of remaining on the grassy summit of Bunker Hill, they continued along the road toward Charlestown, following a ridge that led them to the smaller, seventy-five-foot-high Breed’s Hill, almost half a mile to the southeast. Directly to the south lay the almost completely abandoned settlement of Charlestown. In the days after Lexington and Concord, General Gage had delivered an ultimatum to the selectmen of this little city of approximately three hundred houses, dozens of commercial structures, and wharves. If any provincial soldiers should venture onto the Charlestown peninsula, he would do as Admiral Graves had wanted to do on April 19 and consign the city to the flames. Since then almost all of Charlestown’s residents had sought refuge elsewhere, and the streets and homes of the community that had been settled a year before Boston in the early seventeenth century were now quiet, dark, and strangely empty.
    Just a quarter mile to the south lay the wharves of Boston, with Admiral Graves’s fleet of warships anchored in the waters in between and, even more menacing, the mammoth cannons of the Copp’s Hill battery pointed in their direction. To place a fort overlooking Charlestown on Breed’s Hill—right in the figurative face of the British—was an entirely different undertaking than had been ordered by the Committee of Safety. Instead of a defensive position, this was an unmistakable act of defiance. A fort built here, especially