Bunker Hill

region’s loyalists, who had sought sanctuary from patriot reprisals, the decision to evacuate Boston was overwhelming. “The Tories . . . carried death in their faces,” one inhabitant wrote, “some run distracted.” Washington reported that “by all accounts there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures now are. . . . When the order [was] issued for embarking the troops in Boston, no electric shock—no sudden clap of thunder—in a word the last trump—could not have struck them with greater consternation. They are at their wit’s end.”
    Howe did what he could to accommodate all those who wanted to accompany his army to Halifax, but once again, there was not enough room for all their furnishings and possessions. In the brigantine
Unity
was the family of Adino Paddock, the former commander of Boston’s artillery company, along with seven other loyalist households. The outspoken customs commissioner Benjamin Hallowell, the owner of two mansions—one in Boston, the other in Roxbury—found himself sleeping in a cabin with thirty-six others, “men, women, and children; parents, masters, and mistresses, obliged to pig together on the floor, there being no berths.” The province’s treasurer, Harrison Gray, who two and a half years before had admonished Josiah Quincy Jr. for his treasonous words in the Old South Meetinghouse, boarded the
Francis
, along with thirty-seven others. A total of eleven hundred loyalists divided among thirty vessels ultimately left the wharves of Boston, first sailing past the Castle to the Nantasket Roads at the western end of the harbor, five miles from the city, where they anchored near Paddock and Hull islands and waited for the arrival of the fifty transports bearing the nine thousand soldiers of Howe’s army.
    Many of the loyalists would settle in Canada; others went to England. Neither place seemed like home. Some, such as the lawyer Daniel Leonard, who was named chief justice of Bermuda, established new and flourishing careers. A few, such as Dr. John Jeffries, to whom Joseph Warren had offered the position of surgeon general of the provincial army, eventually returned to Boston and through a combination of personal charm and professional ability once again became respected members of the community. But that was decades in the future, and an exception to the rule of forgiveness. Bostonians, like their Puritan forebears, would prove to have long and exacting memories.
    By purging itself of loyalists, Boston had, in a sense, reaffirmed its origins. The town’s first settlers had put an ocean between them and their king so that they could worship as they pleased. They were unafraid of risk; otherwise they never would have left England for a new and unknown land. Over the course of the next century and a half, Boston had grown from a settlement of a few hundred Puritans to a diverse and thriving port with a strong commercial connection to London. Many Bostonians, particularly the merchants, had come to cherish their ties to Great Britain. In the last decade, however, a new generation of risk takers had staged a revolution, and those who refused to disavow the mother country were about to sail to Halifax, never to return. Boston was, once again, its own “city on a hill.”
    —
    The engineer Archibald Robertson was one of the last to leave. He had spent the two previous days throwing up barriers across the streets and wharves of Boston to impede the progress of any American soldiers who might try to harass the evacuating regulars. Howe had ordered the town’s citizens to remain confined in their homes so they didn’t interfere with his army’s final preparations to depart. Robertson walked the empty, weirdly quiet waterfront. More than twenty-five brigs, schooners, sloops, and ships had been abandoned, some still full of stores, all of them scuttled. General Gage’s chariot lay broken on Long Wharf. The dragoons had left 110 horses in the stables at the rope walks, along with ten tons of hay. “There seems a vast deal of confusion in every department,” Robertson recorded in his diary, “and no settled plan of operations.”
    By 9:00 a.m. on March 17, a Sunday, “all the regiments but the rear guard were embarked.” Robertson, Captain Montresor, and three others lingered on Long Wharf, ready to set fire to a few houses if the enemy should prematurely storm the city, “but none appeared and we went all off in the greatest