Bunker Hill

of
The
Blockade
’s premiere soon made its way across enemy lines. To the minister William Gordon of Roxbury, it seemed almost providential that a play “designed to ridicule us” had been so comically interrupted. “Thus the ridicule,” Gordon wrote, “was turned upon themselves.”
    The rebels, it was soon discovered, had not attacked the British works on Bunker Hill; they had instead sent a detachment of several hundred men under the command of Thomas Knowlton of Connecticut on a raid across the milldam that connected Cambridge to the Charlestown peninsula. The mission’s aim was to destroy what houses still remained in Charlestown so that the British soldiers stationed on the peninsula could no longer use the structures either as barracks or as a source of firewood. Under heavy fire from the guns atop Bunker Hill, Knowlton and his men retreated with five prisoners after torching eight of the houses.
    This operation had been made possible by the ice that had finally begun to form along the edges of the Charles River and would, if the cold persisted, extend across the entire river and Back Bay. With Boston surrounded by ice, Washington might finally be able to launch his long-hoped-for attack. As far as he was concerned, they should have assaulted Boston with the help of boats back in the fall—before the reenlistment crisis reduced his already undermanned army by half. “Could I have foreseen the difficulties which have come upon us,” he wrote Joseph Reed on January 14, “could I have known that such a backwardness would have been discovered in the old soldiers to the service, all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston till this time. When it can now be attempted I will not undertake to say, but this much I will answer for, that no opportunity can present itself earlier than my wishes.”
    All December and January—despite the arrival of his wife, Martha, and her son and daughter-in-law—the tension had been building within Washington. So far his efforts to create a larger and more disciplined regular army had been a failure, forcing him to rely increasingly on the local militias. But it wasn’t only the lack of men; there was the lack of gunpowder as well as a paucity of weapons—problems that had been exacerbated by the Continental Congress’s failure to come forth with the funds he needed to purchase muskets and pay his army. In a rare moment of candor, Washington revealed the extent of his despair to Joseph Reed:
    The reflection upon my situation and that of this army produces many an uneasy hour, when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in, on a thousand accounts—fewer still will believe, if any disaster happens to these lines, from what causes it flows. I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulder and entered the ranks or, if I could have justified the measure to posterity and my own conscience, had retired to the backcountry and lived in a wigwam. If I shall be able to rise superior to these and many other difficulties, which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the eyes of our enemies. For surely if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.
    At a council of war two days later, attended by his generals as well as John Adams and the president of the Massachusetts legislature, James Warren (from Plymouth, and no relation to Joseph Warren), Washington was finally able to get his generals to unanimously agree that “a vigorous attempt ought to be made upon the ministerial army in Boston, as soon as practicable.” Toward that end, it was decided to almost double the size of the existing army of about nine thousand soldiers with the temporary addition of thirteen regiments of militia from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, a process that would take at least a month.
    But there was more. Expected any day was a bonanza even greater than the windfall of armaments provided by Captain Manley’s capture of the
Nancy
. Back on November 15, Henry Knox, the former bookseller with an interest in artillery and a talent for building fortifications, had left Cambridge with his nineteen-year-old brother, William, on a mission to Fort