Bunker Hill

their way into the town and put us all to the sword for our cruelty at Lexington and setting fire to the large, ancient and flourishing town of Charlestown . . . But the glorious expedition we are upon is approved of by an all-wise, all-merciful ministry; and therefore all must be right.” Wrote another, “Our barracks are all hospitals and so offensive is the stench of the wounds that the very air is infected with the smell. What, in God’s name are ye all about in England? Have you forgot us?”
    And in fact, many back in Britain had done exactly that. The boycott of British goods that the colonials hoped would bring the mother country to her knees was having no visible effect. After the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish War in 1774, Great Britain enjoyed what Edmund Burke described as the “most astonishing market.” “The poor are industrious,” one observer wrote from London, “and the manufacturers have full employment. . . . And were it not for the newspapers, the people at large would hardly know there was a civil war in America.” By the fall, the ministry had decided to do what Gage had proposed the year before and mount an army of twenty thousand British soldiers and mercenaries for the war in America. These military preparations also helped to stimulate the economy. “War, indeed,” Burke wrote, “is become a sort of substitute for commerce.”
    But while Britain prospered, her army in Boston was in danger of freezing to death. Howe ordered that the city’s older structures be torn down and used as fuel. In the months ahead, the Old North Meetinghouse and the parsonage of the Old South Meetinghouse, which had been built in the seventeenth century by Governor John Winthrop, were demolished, along with dozens of other buildings. Boston was, in fact, being burned by the British, one historic structure at a time.
    Back in August some regulars had cut down that revered patriot icon, the Liberty Tree. In October the Old South Meetinghouse was taken over by the British light dragoons and converted into a riding school. The soldiers ripped out the pulpit, pews, and seats (one particularly finely carved pew was turned into a hog sty) and laid down a layer of tanbark cloth and manure. The sacred place where patriots such as Josiah Quincy Jr. and Joseph Warren had once spoken before crowds of thousands had become an echoing barn full of horses.
    At the direction of Massachusetts lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver, the Green Dragon Tavern, yet another patriot shrine, was turned into a hospital. But perhaps the ultimate indignity came when Faneuil Hall, Boston’s hallowed seat of town government, was turned into a theater—an institution that proper Bostonians had shunned as immoral since the town’s founding.
    Gage was gone, but his counterpart in the British navy, Admiral Graves, remained, despite the fact that no one seemed to have anything good to say about him. Indeed, if there was anyone who embodied the venality and corruption of the British Empire, it was Graves. During the summer, when all of Boston’s inhabitants—civilians and regulars alike—were desperate for fresh foodstuffs, Graves added to their miseries by refusing to grant fishing permits unless his secretary was paid “a dollar for each boat.” “You may guess what execrations were poured forth,” an officer wrote. That summer, Graves refused to grant customs commissioner Benjamin Hallowell permission to harvest his own hay from Gallup’s Island. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, Hallowell had suggested that Graves place his ships where they could have done some good on the Mystic River; the admiral angrily refused and “from thence sprang a dislike.” “Are we not sufficiently oppressed by the enemies without,” Hallowell wrote Graves on July 20, “but must suffer by those who are sent for our protection?” In August Hallowell confronted Graves in the streets of Boston; Graves drew his sword on the unarmed commissioner, who proceeded to snap the blade in half and pummel the admiral until his face was black and blue. Graves responded by sending one of his young nephews after Hallowell, who was blindsided by a bludgeon as he walked on Cornhill near School Street. The nephew was eventually court-martialed and found guilty of nothing more than “an error in judgment.”
    Throughout the summer and fall, Graves suffered humiliation after humiliation as packs of provincial whaleboats managed to elude his many warships