Bunker Hill

we had been waiting all the year for this favorable event, the enterprise was thought too dangerous!” But even Washington had to admit that he might have allowed his own mounting frustrations to interfere with his better judgment. In one of the most confiding letters he ever wrote to a member of the Continental Congress, he acknowledged to John Hancock that “the irksomeness of my situation . . . might have inclined me to put more to hazard than was consistent with prudence.” The immense pressures of conducting a siege without the resources required to win it had, he confessed, taken a toll. “To have the eyes of the whole continent fixed with anxious expectation of hearing of some great event and to be restrained in every military operation for want of the necessary means of carrying it on, is not very pleasing; especially as the means used to conceal my weakness from the enemy conceals it also from our friends, and adds to their wonder.” In the meantime, he would do his best to embrace the plan “to take post on Dorchester” and see whether, he wrote Reed, “the enemy will be so kind as to come out to us.”
    Nathanael Greene was Washington’s youngest general, but no one on the council of war had a better appreciation of the dilemma facing their commander in chief. An attack on Boston, Greene wrote his brother, “would be horrible if it succeeded and still more horrible if it failed.” And yet, he continued, “the advantage that America would derive from making ourselves masters of the garrison at this time would be inconceivable. It would damp the spirits of Great Britain and give ours a new spring. In a word, it would put a finishing stroke to the war; it would heal all the divisions among ourselves, silence the Tories and work a general reformation throughout the continent.” No wonder Washington yearned to attack Boston.
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    Artemas Ward may have been the earliest and most forceful proponent of the plan to take Dorchester Heights, but Washington acted quickly to give the operation his own personal stamp. As he had witnessed during the construction of the fortifications at Lechmere Point, the freezing temperatures meant that building a redoubt atop the bare, wind-swept hills of Dorchester was going to be no easy matter. By this time a self-taught engineer of unusual promise, thirty-eight-year-old Rufus Putnam of Braintree (and a cousin of General Israel Putnam), had come to his attention. Unlike Henry Knox, everything Putnam knew about the subject of fortifications came not from books but from practical experience, which was admittedly slight. Despite having worked beside several British engineers during the French and Indian War, he “pretended no knowledge of laying works” and had been reluctant to volunteer his services at the beginning of the siege. At the insistence of William Heath, he agreed to try his hand at building the fortifications at Roxbury, and he was soon overseeing the construction of works at Cobble Hill and other critical locations.
    Around the time of the February council of war, Washington invited Putnam to dine at his headquarters, asking that he “tarry after dinner.” Once the two of them were alone, the general “entered in a free conversation on the subject of storming the town of Boston.” By this point, Washington was at least publicly stating that it would be best to begin such an operation by occupying Dorchester; what he wanted Putnam to figure out was how to quickly build a fortification on ground that was frozen solid. “If I could think of any way in which it could be done,” Putnam wrote, “[I was] to make a report to him immediately.”
    That evening, Putnam was on his way back to his quarters in Roxbury when he decided to stop by the residence of General Heath and “pay my respects.” Heath happened to be in, and the officers were soon enjoying a companionable chat when Putnam noticed a book on Heath’s table by the noted British military engineer John Muller. “I immediately requested the general to lend it me,” he wrote. But Heath refused, claiming that “he never lent his books.” “I then told him,” Putnam related, “that he must recollect that he was the one who at Roxbury in a measure compelled [me] to undertake a business of which at the time I confessed I never had read a word about and that he must let me have the book.” After “some more excuses on his part,” Heath finally allowed Putnam to borrow the book.
    Not