Bunker Hill

at Cobble Hill and then Cambridge’s Lechmere Point, Howe’s army barely responded. Washington was dumbfounded. “[I am] unable,” he wrote, “upon any principle whatever to account for their silence, unless it be to lull us into a fatal security.”
    Rather than playing a complex game of psychological warfare, William Howe had simply lost the will to fight. His experience at Bunker Hill had certainly stunned him, but there were other factors contributing to his lassitude. In Europe, winter was a time for armies to rest and recoup. This was not the case, however, in New England, where the ice and snow actually increased an army’s mobility. A hundred years before during King Philip’s War, an intercolonial army had marched across the frozen wetlands of Rhode Island and surprised a huge village of Narragansett Indians in what became known as the Great Swamp Fight. Washington was hopeful of using the ice around Boston to facilitate an attack later that winter. But for Howe the coming cold provided an opportunity to attend plays at Faneuil Hall and gamble with his officers, often attended by the beautiful blond wife of Joshua Loring, a loyalist who’d been appointed the town’s sheriff, at his side.
    Some have blamed the distractions provided by Howe’s affair with Elizabeth Loring for his lack of initiative during the winter of 1775–76. But perhaps the real reason Howe could not bring himself to venture out of Boston was that, like Gage before him, he did not know how to proceed against an enemy composed of British subjects, many of them from a colony that had built a memorial in Westminster Abbey to his beloved older brother. Howe’s ambivalence is revealed in the letter he sent Lord Dartmouth in January. Washington’s army was not “by any means to be despised,” he wrote, “having in it many European soldiers, and all or most of the young men of spirit in the country.” Rather than launching a full-scale attack, might it not be “better policy,” he continued, “to withdraw entirely from the delinquent provinces, and leave the colonists to war with each other for sovereignty.” That Howe was probably correct in his assessment does not change the fact that this was a general who had little interest in a war.
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    Washington tried to be philosophical about the approaching reenlistment crisis, reassuring both a fellow general and himself that “order and subordination in time will take place of confusion, and command be rendered more agreeable.” He knew that many of the soldiers were unhappy about the changes he had put in place for the new Continental Army. As former militiamen, they were used to serving with soldiers from their own colony, but that was not how it necessarily was going to be in the future. “Connecticut wants no Massachusetts man in their corps,” Washington wrote; “Massachusetts thinks there is no necessity for a Rhode-Islander to be introduced amongst them; and New Hampshire says, it’s very hard, that her valuable and experienced officers . . . should be discarded because her own regiments under the new establishment, cannot provide for them.”
    Some of the regiments from Connecticut had decided that they were technically free to depart as early as December 1, and that day the excitable and blasphemous General Lee ordered them to form into what Simeon Lyman described as “a hollow square.” Lee, no doubt followed by his black Pomeranian dog Spado, stepped into the square’s center. “He flung and curst and swore at us,” Lyman wrote, “and said if we would not stay he would order us to go on Bunker Hill and if we would not go he would order the rifleman to fire at us.” Lee’s tantrum did little to change the soldiers’ minds. On December 10, Nathanael Greene reported that the “Connecticut men are going home in shoals this day.” As anyone from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Connecticut knew, this was the way the region’s militia had worked for more than a century. “’Tis the cast of the New Englanders to enlist for a certain time,” Reverend William Gordon wrote, “and when the time is expired to quit the service and return home, let the call for their continuance be ever so urgent.”
    Nathanael Greene understood the phenomenon but could not help but share in his commander’s frustration and anger. “If neither the love of liberty nor dread of slavery will rouse them from the present stupid state they are in,” he wrote, “and they