Bunker Hill

order.” By ten o’clock he was at the Castle and could see “the rebels on the heights of Charlestown and making a great parade on Dorchester Heights.” As it so happened, March 17 was St. Patrick’s Day, a date celebrated by Irish Protestants in Boston since 1737. Now Bostonians had yet another reason to celebrate March 17, a date that became known as Evacuation Day.
    —
    A young officer named James Wilkinson from Maryland was one of the first into the city. Wilkinson had come via the Charlestown peninsula, where the British had delayed the arrival of the American troops by leaving several “effigies” that looked like regulars with their muskets shouldered. Only after General John Sullivan had determined that the fortress at Bunker Hill was “defended by lifeless sentries” had Wilkinson and the others been allowed to cross the Neck. Near “the ruins of Charlestown . . . now buried in its own ashes,” he’d found a canoe in which he and several others paddled to Boston “on the
presumption
the enemy had taken their departure.” After disembarking at the waterfront, they’d followed “a long narrow winding street” but were unable to find a living soul to talk to. “The town presented a frightful solitude in the bosom of a numerous population . . . ,” he remembered; “a death-like silence pervaded an inhabited city, and spectacles of waste and spoil struck the eye at almost every step.”
    Even days later, the three thousand or so Bostonians who had lasted out the siege had a muted, exhausted air about them. James Thacher marched into the city three days after the evacuation. “The inhabitants appeared at their doors and windows,” he wrote; “though they manifested a lively joy on being liberated from a long imprisonment, they were not altogether free from melancholy gloom which ten tedious months’ siege has spread over their countenances.” Two days later, Thacher watched as “a concourse of people from the country crowd[ed] into town, full of friendly solicitude. It is truly interesting to witness the tender interviews and fond embraces of those who have been long separated.”
    One of those left pining for a reunion was John Andrews, whose beloved wife Ruthy was not able to return to Boston for several weeks. He missed her terribly, but to his brother-in-law in Philadelphia he asserted that despite all he’d suffered over the course of the last five months, he’d “never suffered the
least
depression of spirits . . . for a
persuasion
that my country
would eventually
prevail, kept up my spirits, and never suffered my
hopes
to
fail
.” Andrews’s good mood was no doubt reinforced when at the end of March none other than George Washington, accompanied by Martha and her son and daughter-in-law, came to his house for dinner “with no earlier notice,” he wrote his brother-in-law, “than half past eleven the same day.”
    Two days after the evacuation, the British saw fit to destroy the fortifications at the Castle with a spectacular series of explosions. The resulting fire raged throughout the night with such intensity that a lieutenant from Connecticut discovered that even though he was several miles away he was able to read a letter from his wife by the light of the burning fortress. The fate of the Castle served as a fresh reminder of the devastation that had been avoided through the occupation of Dorchester Heights. Washington, however, continued “lamenting the disappointment” of not having been able to implement what he described in a letter to a friend in Virginia as his “premeditated plan” to attack Boston, “as we were prepared for them at all points.”
    Even though he still wished he had been given the chance to attack Boston—an assault that would have surely laid much of the city to waste and probably destroyed his army—Washington was now perceived as the general who had rescued Boston from ruin. On March 28, the day after the British evacuation fleet finally departed the Nantasket Roads for Halifax, the Boston selectmen formally thanked him for having “saved a large, elegant, and once populous city from total destruction.” His Excellency responded in kind, claiming that “what greatly adds to my happiness [is] that this desirable event has been effected with so little effusion of human blood.”
    There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of Washington’s remarks. One of his greatest gifts was his ability to learn from a situation, and by