Bunker Hill

them one moment after the relations claim
their right
.”
    She also reported that her fellow New Englanders appeared to have already forgotten about her beloved Joseph Warren. “Instead of seeing people look dejected with the dire calamities that are impending over our heads, they appear like frolic coming to [a Harvard] commencement. My melancholy countenance is a novelty in this place. . . . Everything appears with a different affect to me now and the sight of my friends gives a keener edge to my grief.” She still had trouble believing that Warren was dead—especially since she could find no one who had actually seen his body. “Pray heaven,” she wrote, “I may some time or other be able to acquiesce in the received opinion or else be confirmed in my own hopes and ardent wishes [that he is alive].”
    But the most devastating blow had come from Warren’s own family. His brother John, she had just learned, had sold Warren’s “every feather bed” to George Washington. Another man—and not just any other man—was literally sleeping in her dead fiancée’s bed. She poured out her heart to John Hancock, who “appeared,” she wrote to Mrs. Dix, “much affected by my relation [and] said his brother had no right to do those things without proper authority.”
    What, if anything, Hancock ever did to appease Mercy Scollay is unknown. There is evidence, however, that she found a way, if indirectly, to stake her claim to Warren’s legacy. Later that year an elegy to Joseph Warren appeared as a broadside. This poem by an anonymous author is not about a noble warrior dying heroically on the battlefield; it is about a loving father and friend, “faithful, gentle and sincere,” whose “orphan babes” deserve the sympathy and support “of every parent through the extensive land.” More significantly, the poem, almost certainly penned by Scollay, contains a rhetorical question:
    Nor were the duties of a friend and sire
    Neglected midst those busy scenes of life:
    Speak, speak thou spark of bright immortal fire,
    Who claimed on Earth the tender name of wife?
    A conjecture haunted Mercy Scollay for the rest of her life, and still has import today: What if Joseph Warren had survived the Battle of Bunker Hill? Would the course of American history have been any different? One person, at least, believed he knew the answer to that question. If Joseph Warren had lived, the loyalist Peter Oliver maintained in 1782, Washington would have been “an obscurity.”
    —
    Siege warfare dates back to before 3000 BC, by which time settlements in the Middle East had begun to defend themselves from attack by building large stone walls, ditches, towers, and other protective structures. Sieges were conducted by the ancient Chinese, Greeks, and Romans; in the Middle Ages, siege warfare led to the construction of castles throughout Europe and beyond. Although the development of heavy artillery rendered these once impregnable structures obsolete, engineering advances in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to the creation of a new breed of fortifications that proved surprisingly durable even in the face of severe cannon fire. Despite all these technological advances, the basics of a siege were the same in 1775 as they’d been at the Battle of Jericho: an army surrounds a city with the intent of conquering its inhabitants through a combination of attrition, intimidation, and, if necessary, force.
    By the fall, Washington’s army had succeeded in creating what was known as a line of contravallation: a ring of earthworks that encircled Boston. But there was a fatal flaw. As long as the British maintained control of the harbor, their supply ships from Canada and England could provide the regulars with food. Gage’s army could no longer get any fresh provisions from the country, but as long as their warships succeeded in keeping the entrance to Boston Harbor open, they were not going to starve.
    Washington had to somehow force the issue, either by an outright assault on the city or, as had occurred at Breed’s Hill, by luring the British soldiers out from behind their defensive walls and engaging them in a pitched battle. But here too Washington was stymied by a lack of gunpowder and artillery. As a consequence, he could do little to displace the more than eight thousand British troops who remained in Boston.
    Occasional bursts of activity broke the monotony—when, for example, New Hampshire’s General John Sullivan