Bunker Hill

of
independence
was become a favorite point in the army, and that it was offensive to pray for the king.” Finally, after more than a decade of clinging to the fiction that the king remained America’s most stalwart friend, the colonists were beginning to see the truth. The policies of King George and his ministers were one and the same. The only alternative left was what Nathanael Greene termed, in a letter written on December 20, “a declaration of independence.”
    By the end of the month, Washington had decided to reverse himself on the issue of African American soldiers and allow free blacks into the army. Back in Virginia, royal governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, had offered the colony’s slaves freedom if they fought on the side of the British, and this may have contributed to Washington’s change of heart. But the most compelling reason he decided to put aside the prejudices of his southern upbringing had to do with what had transpired six months before at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
    On December 5, thirteen of Washington’s officers filed a petition to the Massachusetts General Court, requesting that the African American Salem Poor be rewarded for his bravery on June 17, 1775. Poor had “behaved,” the petition read, “like an experienced officer as well as an excellent soldier.” It had been Poor, many claimed, who had shot Major Pitcairn as the British officer mounted the wall of the redoubt, shouting “The day is ours!”
    The New Englanders in Washington’s army were making a statement: If during a battle when so many white officers had displayed irresolution and outright cowardice, an African American private had fought with such distinction, then certainly such a man should not be denied the ability to fight for his country. Washington appears to have taken this kind of testimony to heart, and by the beginning of the new year Salem Poor, who had purchased his freedom for the price of twenty-seven pounds in 1769, was a soldier in the Continental Army.
    —
    On December 22, the Continental Congress responded to Washington’s query about whether he could attack Boston even if it meant the total destruction of the city. His Excellency, Congress informed him, was free to make an assault on the British “in any manner he may think expedient, notwithstanding the town and property in it may thereby be destroyed.”
    Washington was going to need every soldier—white or black—that he could get.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    The Clap of Thunder
    O n January 1, 1776, a British officer approached the American lines in Roxbury under a flag of truce. After more than fifteen months of continual expansion, the fortifications around Boston had been pushed to the farthest portion of the Neck, where massive earthen walls (which a Connecticut soldier compared to the fabled fortress of Gibraltar) had been augmented by the guns of a floating battery in the Back Bay as well as lines of abatis—obstacles made from the trunks and sharpened branches of trees that served the same purpose as modern-day barbed wire—to prevent the enemy from storming the bulwarks by foot. At the old town gate, well within these outer lines, a moat had been dug across the Neck, meaning that Boston, surrounded by its “chain of forts,” was now an actual island.
    Between the British and American lines was a flat marshy sweep of bottomland punctuated by the charred remnants of several burned-out buildings. Waving a white flag, the British officer, probably accompanied by one or two others, walked across the fire-scorched no-man’s-land.
    At least one of the men was carrying copies of a broadside for distribution among the soldiers of the Continental Army. This was more than the usual proclamation from General Howe; this was the King’s Speech, delivered before Parliament back on October 27. It had been published by “the Boston gentry” with the hope of putting the fear of God into the rebel army.
    Once and for all, the king had called the colonists’ bluff, declaring that their “strongest protestations of loyalty to me” were both absurd and offensive given that they were presently engaged in a “rebellious war . . . carried for the purpose of establishing an independent Empire.” The colonists could no longer pretend that they still remained loyal to their sovereign; they must either return to the British fold or admit that they were engaged in a war of independence. The loyalists felt confident that once the rebels realized