Bunker Hill

one equipped with provincial cannons that could rake British shipping and the Boston waterfront, invited a forceful response from the British army. Given the provincials’ almost nonexistent reserves of gunpowder, this was not what the Committee of Safety had in mind. But this was where Prescott, Putnam, and Gridley began to build the fort.
    We will never know exactly why they arrived at this decision. According to the only account we have of what transpired among the three officers that night, Gridley, the engineer, and one of the other officers wanted to begin by fortifying Bunker Hill, but “on the pressing importunity” of the third officer, they started with Breed’s Hill instead. Given Putnam’s aggressive personality—he was the one, after all, who led the brazen march down to the Charlestown waterfront back in May—many have assumed that he browbeat the others into disregarding Ward’s orders and building the fort in a place that General Gage could not ignore. But as the events of the following day revealed, Prescott was just as forceful, if not more so, than Putnam, who appears to have been there only as a volunteer. No matter whose idea it was, Prescott was in charge of the operation and was therefore the one who assumed ultimate responsibility for the location of the fort. In the day to come he would fight with a ruthless, often inspiring ferocity, but that did not change the fact that dysfunction came to define a battle that was ultimately named—perhaps appropriately, given its befuddled beginnings—for the wrong hill. As John Pitts later wrote to Samuel Adams, “Never was more confusion and less command.”
    And so they began. Around midnight, with only four hours between them and the approach of morning, Gridley began to sketch out the contours of a quadrangular fort on Breed’s Hill. In addition to pickaxes and shovels, the men had been provided with fascines (cylindrical bundles of brushwood), gabions (cages filled with rocks or soil), and empty barrels that were used to build the fort’s earthen walls, the two longest of which stretched approximately 132 feet and met to form a west-facing V. A ditch surrounded the roofless, fully enclosed fort, known technically as a redoubt, which could be accessed from the rear, east-facing wall by what was called a sally port.
    The redoubt (which means, ironically enough, “place of retreat”) was about as simple a structure as could be designed but still required hours of backbreaking labor to build. They wanted their efforts to remain a secret for as long as possible. Unfortunately, only a few hundred yards away were several men-of-war, floating cities of sailors whose watches stood on the decks gazing across the warm, unruffled harbor. The absence of wind meant that the sounds of shovels and pickaxes banging against rocks and pebbles echoed unimpeded across the dark emptiness toward Boston. Fearful that they were about to be discovered, Prescott sent a group of sixty men, which included that devout veteran of the Battle of Chelsea Creek, Amos Farnsworth, down into the empty village of Charlestown to act as sentinels. Those who were not patrolling the waterfront were told to wait in the town house and, Farnsworth recorded, “not to shut our eyes.” Prescott’s concern was so great that he descended the hill several times that night to make sure they were still undetected. He later told his son about how relieved he felt when he heard the watch aboard the sloop-of-war
Lively
report, “All’s well.”
    —
    As it turned out, they
were
detected. General Henry Clinton, living in John Hancock’s house on Beacon Hill, was having trouble sleeping that night. So he went for a walk along the northern margins of Boston and quickly realized that something was going on in the direction of Charlestown. He could hear it—the unmistakable sounds of digging. He stood either on a wharf or, more likely, on a well-positioned hill and stared into the darkness through his spyglass. Sure enough, he “saw them at work.”
    He rushed to Province House and awakened Thomas Gage. In an early-morning meeting with Gage and Howe, Clinton urged “a landing in two divisions at day break.” Howe appeared to think it was a good idea, but as he so often did when presented with a plan for immediate action, Gage demurred. They would wait to see what the light of day revealed.
    —
    It came gradually—the brightening of the sky in the east toward the islands of Boston