Bunker Hill

the Massachusetts authorities, he quickly found a grander and more appropriate alternative—the Vassall house on Cambridge’s Tory Row, about a mile from the town common. Here he installed what he called his “family,” surrounding himself with a staff that tended to be from just about anywhere but New England. One of the exceptions was his commissary general Joseph Trumbull, from Connecticut, who was joined briefly by his younger brother John, the future painter, who served as one of Washington’s aides. “I suddenly found myself in the family of one of the most distinguished and dignified men of the age,” the younger Trumbull remembered; “surrounded at his table by the principal officers of the army, and in constant intercourse with them.”
    A year before, Boston’s patriots had spoken disparagingly of the aristocratic opulence of the loyalists of Tory Row. Now their new general, whom everyone referred to as His Excellency, was living in one of the neighborhood’s grandest houses in a style befitting the home’s original owners. A revolution that had begun when several dozen yeomen farmers decided to linger defiantly at Lexington Green was now being led by a general who looked and acted suspiciously like the enemy. But whereas the provincial soldiers appear to have been for the most part pleasantly surprised by their new commander, the feeling was hardly mutual. Washington was not just disappointed by the New Englanders who had begun this war with the mother country; he was disgusted by them.
    He had been led to believe by the Continental Congress that he would find twenty thousand battle-tested soldiers. What he found instead was a northern version of the undisciplined militiamen who had made his first command in the western wilderness a nightmare. This was not a proper army; this was a mob of puritanical savages that included seventeen actual Indians from the Massachusetts town of Stockbridge as well as Native Americans from New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Even worse, from the perspective of a slaveholder from Virginia, was the presence of a significant number of African Americans in the ranks.
    Rather than tents, these soldiers lived in hovels or, in the case of the Stockbridge Indians, wigwams. “Some are made of boards,” the minister William Emerson wrote, “some of sailcloth and some partly of one and partly of the other. Others are made of stone and turf and others again of brick and others brush. Some are thrown up in a hurry and look as if they could not help it—mere necessity—others are curiously wrought with doors and windows, done with wreathes and withes in manner of a basket.” Emerson thought “the great variety of the American camp is upon the whole rather a beauty than a blemish to the army,” but Washington thought otherwise, describing the New Englanders in a letter to his cousin in Virginia as “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” But there was more. He detected “an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people, which believe me prevails but too generally among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the army, who are nearly of the same kidney with the privates.”
    The extremity of Washington’s reaction to the army he had inherited is curious. Generals Charles Lee and Horatio Gates, two former British officers whose military experience was much more extensive than Washington’s, came to recognize that the militia model upon which this New England army was based had great potential in the peculiar kind of war that lay ahead. These farmers might lack the rigid training of the British regulars, but they knew how to fight. As Gates was overheard to say that fall, “he never desired to see better soldiers than the New England men made.” By reacting so negatively, Washington was in danger of irreparably damaging his relationship with the army before he had a chance to rebuild it.
    The problem, as Washington saw it, was in how these soldiers had been originally assembled. Since an officer’s rank was based on how many men from his hometown he could convince to serve under him, it was almost impossible for him to get these soldiers to do something they didn’t want to do. Making a bad situation even worse was the fact that the men’s enlistments ended in December, just five months away. If these churlish, unkempt Yankees weren’t happy with how they were being treated, they would undoubtedly refuse to reenlist for another