Bunker Hill

hoped, the British attacked the next day, what might be the battle to end all battles would occur on March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Mifflin said that this “would have a wonderful effect upon the spirits of the New Englanders.” For some reason, Horatio Gates “deemed it an improper time,” but after a spirited debate the council decided, “by a majority of one,” to launch the operation on the night of March 4.
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    Washington’s great fear was that the British might learn of the intended advance and seize Dorchester Heights before the Americans could make their move. The near-constant arrival of militiamen and the cutting of trees for fascines and abatis (the Warren family apple orchard in Roxbury was soon sacrificed to the cause) meant that just about everyone living in the towns surrounding Boston knew that something significant was about to happen. On the night of February 26, what Washington described as “a rascally rifleman” deserted to the British. Convinced that the enemy now knew of their plans, Washington ordered Artemas Ward in Roxbury to station “six or eight trusty men by way of lookouts” while preparing several regiments “to be ready to march at a moment’s warning to the heights of Dorchester; for should the enemy get possession of those hills before us they would render it a difficult task to dispossess them.”
    On February 27, he issued an order intended to prepare the army for the impending confrontation while making it clear that instances of cowardice similar to those that had marred the Battle of Bunker Hill were not to be tolerated:
    As the season is now fast approaching, [he wrote,] when every man must expect to be drawn into the field of action, it is highly necessary that he should prepare his mind, as well as everything necessary for it. It is a noble cause we are engaged in; it is the cause of virtue and mankind. Every temporal advantage and comfort to us and our posterity depends upon the vigor of our exertions; in short, freedom or slavery must be the result of our conduct. There can therefore be no greater inducement to men to behave well. But it may not be amiss for the troops to know that if any man in action shall presume to skulk, hide himself, or retreat from the enemy, without the orders of his commanding officer, he will be
instantly shot down
as an example of cowardice, cowards having too frequently disconcerted the best formed troops by their dastardly behavior.
    In anticipation of the confrontation that might win or lose the siege and perhaps even the war, Washington began to clear his desk of the considerable paperwork that had accumulated over the last eight months. Back in October, the African American poet Phillis Wheatley had sent a poem she had written praising him. “Not knowing whether it might not be considered rather as a mark of my own vanity than as a compliment to her,” he explained in a letter to Joseph Reed, “I laid it aside till I came across it . . . while searching over a parcel of papers the other day in order to destroy such as were useless.” On February 28, in the midst of the feverish preparation for the move on Dorchester, he wrote the poet a letter, apologizing for the delay and praising her poem as “striking proof of your great poetical talents.” Then Washington, the owner of several hundred slaves in Virginia, did something remarkable. He invited the young black woman to pay him a visit. “If you should ever come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the muses.”
    He attended to personal business as well, writing to his wife’s brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett, about “my landed affairs on the Ohio.” Washington had originally purchased this vast tract of land as an investment. He was now beginning to look to the property as a possible refuge. If “the worst event” should occur on March 5—if the war should be lost and he was stripped of his estate at Mount Vernon—this land along the Ohio River “will,” he explained to Bassett, “serve for an asylum.”
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    On the night of March 2, cannons in Lechmere Point began lobbing in both shot (solid cannonballs) and shells (hollow projectiles containing explosives) into Boston. Archibald Robertson, a thirty-year-old British engineer stationed at the newly constructed battery on what he and his fellow countrymen called Mount Whoredom, just beside Beacon Hill, estimated that the rebels fired “11