Bunker Hill

learned that “Howe was seen to scratch his head and heard to say by those that were about him, that he did not know what he should do, that the provincials . . . had done more work in one night than his whole army would have done in six months.” The engineer Archibald Robertson estimated that the fortifications must have been the work of between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand men.
    The rumor among the Americans was that Howe had long since vowed that should they dare to “break ground” on Dorchester Heights he would “sally on us [even] if he was sure of losing two-thirds of his army.” As the soldiers atop Dorchester Heights waited to see whether Howe was as good as his supposed word, the British batteries began firing at the new forts. The surgeon James Thacher was with the soldiers on the Heights. “Cannon shot are continually rolling and rebounding over the hill,” he wrote in his diary, “and it is astonishing to observe how little our soldiers are terrified by them.” But the British artillerymen had a problem. Dorchester Heights was simply too high for them to fire at it effectively. “They endeavored to elevate their cannons so as to breach our works by sinking the hinder wheels . . . into the earth,” General John Sullivan wrote, “but after an unsuccessful fire of about two hours, they grew weary of it and desisted.”
    Even before the cessation of artillery fire, onlookers began to make their way to Dorchester. “The hills and elevations in this vicinity are covered with spectators,” James Thacher reported, “to witness deeds of horror in the expected conflict.” All of Boston lay before them. “Nothing could take place at the wharves or next to the water,” one observer wrote, “but we could note it by the help of glasses.” It certainly looked as if Howe were preparing to attack. “The wharf was thronged with soldiers,” wrote William Gordon, who along with Thacher was “looking upon the adjacent hills for a bloody battle.” As the regulars boarded transports and were taken to the Castle, the natural staging ground for an attack, the Americans on Dorchester Heights “rejoiced at seeing it, clapped their hands and wished for the expected attack.”
    Their British counterparts were not as enthusiastic. A Boston resident later recounted how the regulars lined up along the town’s streets “looked in general pale and dejected and said to one another that it would be another Bunker’s Hill affair or worse.” In anticipation of scaling the American bulwarks, they collected ladders and cut them into ten-foot lengths.
    The optimum time for a British attack was at high tide, which was at two that afternoon, and the Americans watched with mounting excitement to see whether Howe dared to go through with it. By this time Washington had appeared on the Heights and was overheard exhorting, “Remember it is the fifth of March!” and “Avenge the death of your brethren!” “It was immediately asked,” William Gordon wrote, “what the general had said by those that were not near enough to hear, and as soon answered; and so from one to another through all the troops, which added fresh fuel to the martial fire before kindled.”
    All the while, on the other side of the Boston peninsula, four thousand American soldiers under the commands of Generals Putnam, Sullivan, and Greene were waiting at the mouth of the Charles River, ready to climb into their boats and begin the assault of the city. Greene and half the troops were to land just to the south of Barton’s Point at the northwestern tip of Boston; Sullivan was to come ashore at the Boston Common; both were to fight their way through the city until they reached the town gate and joined their compatriots coming in from Roxbury.
    But as it turned out, Howe had decided to delay the move on Dorchester Heights until the following morning. That night the surgeon James Thacher’s regiment, which had been on station for the last twenty-four hours, was allowed to return to their barracks in Roxbury for some rest. “I bade adieu to Dorchester Heights,” he recorded in his journal in the early morning hours of March 6, “without being called to dress a single wound.”
    For William Howe and his officers, it proved to be a most tension-filled evening and night. Archibald Robertson, for one, believed that the general was making a terrible mistake by even considering an attack. The American works atop the Heights were simply too