Bunker Hill

lines. In an attempt to apply some order to this mess, the Continental Congress had appointed Dr. Benjamin Church to be the equivalent of the army’s surgeon general, but the controversial doctor had already angered and alienated a significant number of his fellow physicians.
    And then there was the issue of the riflemen from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, who the Continental Congress had believed were going to wreak havoc with the British sentries. Thanks to their weapons’ grooved barrels (which imparted a stabilizing spin to the bullet), the riflemen could reputedly hit a tiny target two hundred yards away—more than twice the range of the average musket. Unfortunately, the riflemen proved to be even more undisciplined than the Yankees. When they weren’t threatening mutiny, they were deserting to the British. At one point a fight broke out between a group of riflemen from Virginia and a regiment of fishermen from Marblehead. Years later, Israel Trask, who was just a boy of ten at the time, remembered seeing Washington suddenly appear with his black slave Billy Lee at his side, both of them mounted on big, noble horses.
    With the spring of a deer [Trask remembered], he leaped from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the melee [and] with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternately shaking and talking to them. In this position the eye of the belligerents caught sight of the general. Its effect on them was instantaneous flight at the top of their speed in all directions from the scene of the conflict. Less than fifteen minutes had elapsed from the commencement of the row before the general and his two criminals were the only occupants of the field of action.
    But the misbehavior of the riflemen was nothing compared to the challenge Washington faced in supplying his army with gunpowder. When he first arrived in July, he had been assured that the army had 308 barrels of the precious substance. Three weeks later he learned that there were, in actuality, only 90 barrels, meaning that each man in this army of fourteen thousand (as opposed to the advertised twenty thousand) had enough gunpowder for just nine cartridges. General Sullivan from New Hampshire reported that when Washington heard this stunning news, he was rendered speechless for the next half hour. Without powder, Washington could not attack the British. “Could I have foreseen what I have, and am like to experience,” he complained, “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”
    For the most part, Washington seems to have kept his frustrations to himself. The persona he had labored to create over the years—that of a dignified, modest, physically magnificent, and exquisitely dressed American nobleman—provided him with a shield to hide behind. If privately he fumed, he impressed almost everyone he met with his equanimity and willingness to listen, even if that too was an act. “[He] has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point,” Abigail Adams wrote, “that if he was really not one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.”
    And besides, this summer of disappointments had its occasional moments of promise. In hopes of quickly securing some more gunpowder, he began to look to the possibility of sending out a fleet of armed schooners that might prey on the British supply ships that continued to stream into Boston Harbor. It would take months before the schooners came up with any tangible results, but at least the creation of what was, in essence, an American navy provided Washington with a diversion from the tedium of this unrelenting siege.
    In August he decided to send Benedict Arnold, just back from Fort Ticonderoga, on an expedition first proposed by Jonathan Brewer back in May. Working his way up the Kennebec River, Arnold would eventually arrive at the Saint Lawrence River, link up with yet another advance toward Canada from New York being led by General Richard Montgomery, and take Quebec. The plan—aimed at “liberating” Canada from the British Empire—proved almost impossible to implement, but like the initiative with the schooners, the Arnold Expedition demonstrated an early willingness on Washington’s part to explore potentially innovative solutions to seemingly