Bunker Hill

challenging—especially on the down slopes, when the huge sleds threatened to run ahead of the teams that were pulling them. They were also plagued by a frustrating lack of snow, and when another “cruel thaw” left them temporarily stranded in the town of Westfield, Knox took the opportunity to show the country people, many of whom had never before seen a cannon, what one of these “big shooting irons” could do, repeatedly firing a mortar that came to be known as “Old Sow.” By this time Knox had learned that with the help of Washington and John Adams—both of whom had come to believe that the embarrassing failures of the artillery regiment during the Battle of Bunker Hill required new leadership—the Continental Congress had named Knox as Richard Gridley’s replacement.
    That night in Westfield an appreciative crowd gathered around the twenty-five-year-old colonel at the town’s inn. Many of the men were members of the Westfield militia and, like most town militias throughout New England, there were a disproportionate number of officers. This imbalance had made it necessary for Washington to reduce the officer corps in the Continental Army, a move that had inevitably angered many former officers and contributed to the reenlistment crisis. Now in Westfield, as Knox was introduced to officer after officer, he could appreciate firsthand one of the many difficulties his commander in chief had been forced to confront while he had been overseeing the transportation of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga. Once the introductions had been completed in the Westfield tavern, Knox smiled broadly and said, “What a pity it is that our soldiers are not as numerous as our officers.”
    By January 25 Knox was back in Cambridge, having completed his mission. Not only had his journey made possible this windfall of artillery, it had provided the officers of Washington’s army—particularly those in the artillery regiment—with time to reconcile themselves to the fact that a twenty-five-year-old with minimal military experience had ascended to the rank of colonel. There had been more than a little outrage—Thomas Crafts, who had hoped the appointment might have gone to him, wrote John Adams of the “astonishment, mortification, and disappointment I was thrown into”—but at least Knox had not been around to experience it. By the time he did return to Cambridge, he had achieved a significant success that helped put Washington’s decision to promote the young artilleryman in its proper perspective. Officers might continue to grumble, but events were about to unfold that soon commanded everyone’s attention.
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    Washington had much more on his mind than the siege of Boston. By the end of January, he had decided to send General Lee to New York. Convinced that General Clinton was headed for that city, he wanted one of his generals there to prepare for the possibility of a future British attack. Word had also reached Washington of a major setback in Canada. Montgomery and Arnold’s attempt to take Quebec had failed. Montgomery was dead and Arnold injured, and the prospects were not good. The arrival of a delegation of Mohawks from the north provided a different approach to influencing the balance of power along the Canadian border, but by the beginning of February, Washington’s focus had returned to attacking Howe’s army in Boston.
    On February 16, he convened yet another council of war. Three days before he had visited the works at Lechmere Point, where the engineer Jeduthan Baldwin had been laboring since December to construct a fortification that might accommodate some of the cannons Knox had secured from Ticonderoga. The problem was the frost—which extended almost two feet below the ground—making the earth, in Baldwin’s words, “as hard as a rock.” In a single night in January, the ground had frozen an additional eight inches down, and the next morning Baldwin and his men “pried up cakes of frozen earth nine feet long and three feet broad.” As Baldwin could attest, building an adequate redoubt in these conditions was almost impossible.
    Somehow, however, Baldwin was close to achieving the unachievable, and during an inspection of the site on February 13, Washington saw that the bitter cold had finally reached the point that the ice might help rather than hinder his plans. As Baldwin recorded in his diary, they “found a good bridge of ice to Boston.” The time had come, Washington decided, to