Bunker Hill

intractable problems.
    Closer to home, Washington was relieved to discover that not all of the officers in the army he had inherited from General Ward were the spineless, self-serving imbeciles he initially took them to be. General Nathanael Greene from Rhode Island, a thirty-three-year-old lapsed Quaker who walked with a limp, was cool, thoughtful, and refreshingly forceful for a man of his tender years. It also didn’t hurt matters that Greene had a beautiful wife from Block Island.
    Just when Washington had begun to think that he was without any competent engineers, he came upon the lumbering former bookseller Henry Knox of Boston. Knox had overseen the design and construction of the most impressive works Washington had come across so far in Roxbury. Knox was big and imposing in the manner of Washington, but there was also an almost cherubic fleshiness and good humor about him. He freely admitted that almost everything he knew about engineering and artillery had come from the books he had sold in his store. A few years earlier he had lost several fingers of his left hand when his fowling piece exploded on Noddle’s Island, and he concealed the injury by wrapping his hand in a stylish silk scarf. Although only twenty-five years of age, he might be just the one to make sense of the army’s artillery regiment. And like Nathanael Greene, he had a fetching wife, the ebullient and raven-haired former Lucy Flucker, daughter of the province’s secretary, Thomas Flucker. Washington, it seems, had a weakness for charismatic but physically damaged officers, particularly ones with beautiful spouses.
    —
    Back on the morning of April 19, thirteen-year-old Benjamin Russell and his schoolmates from the Queen Street Writing School had followed General Percy’s brigade out of Boston. Events quickly left them marooned in Cambridge with no way to communicate with their parents back in Boston. Since then, Russell had become an errand boy for the army, picking up his company’s provisions at the commissary in Cambridge and returning to the lines laden with drink and foodstuffs. He and four soldiers were making their way through the town’s streets when they came upon Russell’s father and uncle, who had “just escaped from Boston.”
    Throughout the summer and fall Bostonians kept finding ways to get out of the city. Some were lucky enough to receive permits to pass across the lines. At least one inhabitant—a barber named Richard Carpenter—swam his way to freedom, only to return to Boston, once again by swimming, and get thrown into jail, where he languished for the duration of the siege as a suspected spy. The boats that daily departed from the town wharves to fish in Boston Harbor provided another way to sneak out of the city; that was how George Hewes, the shoemaker who had gotten caned by the customs agent John Malcom a year and a half before, managed to make his escape.
    Whatever method Benjamin Russell’s father used, he showed little joy at finally finding his long-lost son. Instead of wrapping the boy in a hug, Mr. Russell grabbed him by the shoulders and began to berate him “for not writing.” One of the soldiers came to Russell’s defense. “Don’t shake that boy, Sir,” he said. “He is our clerk.”
    Russell’s days with the army were numbered. His father took him to see General Putnam, who agreed to discharge the boy into his father’s custody. Soon Russell was in Worcester and indentured to the newspaper editor Isaiah Thomas.
    Around this same time in August, Mercy Scollay and two of Joseph Warren’s young daughters traveled from Worcester to the seat of the newly reinstituted General Court at Watertown. As might be expected, Scollay had been devastated by the news of Warren’s death. “For a time,” she wrote, “[I was] incapable of writing or feeling any animating sensations.” What made it particularly difficult was what she described as “my uncertain situation.” Although she and Warren had agreed to marry and she had been acting as his children’s surrogate parent for the last four months, she had no legal claim to Warren’s offspring. The Continental Congress in Philadelphia was then in recess, and with John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Adams back in New England, she had sought them out for advice as to what she should do. “[I] find nothing can be done respecting the children,” she reported to her friend Mrs. Dix in Worcester, “till a judge is appointed and I cannot hold