Bunker Hill

the end of March—three weeks after the taking of Dorchester Heights—he had, with considerable reluctance, started to reconcile himself to the fact that what he wanted to happen in any given situation was ultimately beside the point. “I will not lament or repine at any act of Providence,” he wrote Reed, “because I am in a great measure a convert to [the poet] Mr. Pope’s opinion that whatever is, is right.” This did not prevent him from once again rehashing in his letter all the reasons why his plan to attack the city would have worked, but the evidence was nonetheless clear: Washington had begun to recognize that his role as commander in chief was not all about winning glory on the battlefield. If he had failed to head off a coming war with one brilliant and bloody stroke, he had accomplished something far more difficult. He had forged the beginning of an army that might—just might—lay the groundwork for a new American society.
    —
    On the morning of April 4, Washington left his headquarters in Cambridge and began what proved to be a ten-day march to New York. Soon after, John Warren and his brother Eben located their older brother’s body in its shallow grave on Breed’s Hill. The remains were badly decomposed, but the same false teeth that had allowed Dr. Jeffries to make the identification soon after the Battle of Bunker Hill also enabled John and Eben to verify that this was indeed their brother. A funeral service was held at King’s Chapel, which, being an Anglican church and made of stone, had suffered no damage during the British occupation.
    Warren was buried with all the honors due a former grand master of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge. One prominent mason, however, was unable to attend the service. The merchant John Rowe had spent much of the last year and a half not sure of where he stood when it came to the tug-of-war between patriot and loyalist interests. But when Rowe arrived at King’s Chapel on April 8 “to attend and walk in procession with the lodges under my jurisdiction with our proper jewels and clothing,” he was—to his “great mortification”—“very much insulted by some furious and hot persons without the least provocation.” One of his fellow masons thought it “most prudent for me to retire.” That evening, Rowe was plagued by “some uneasy reflections in my mind as I am not conscious to myself of doing anything prejudicial to the cause of America either by will or deed.”
    In June, Benjamin Church was returned to Boston from his confinement in Connecticut. The General Court’s plans to exchange him for an American prisoner inspired what Church’s wife described as “a riot.” The town’s inhabitants wanted to see the hated spy suitably punished. Once tempers eventually cooled, Church was allowed to board a ship for Martinique in January 1778. When the ship was lost in a storm with all hands, Bostonians could rest assured that justice had finally been served.
    For a variety of reasons, hundreds of loyalists had decided to remain in Boston. The Reverend Mather Byles, sixty-nine, was the minister of the Hollis Street Meeting. When a member of his congregation asked how he could possibly remain a “brainless Tory,” he replied, “Tell me, which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant 3,000 miles away, or by 3,000 tyrants not a mile away?” By the time Byles had been stripped of his ministry and confined to his house under an armed guard (a noted punster, he referred to the sentinel as his “observe-a-Tory”), Boston had been revisited by the legendary Joyce Junior, the fabled “chairman of the committee for tarring and feathering.” In an advertisement in the
Boston Gazette,
Joyce announced that he had returned “after almost two years absence” to rid the city of “those shameless brass faced Tories, who have the audaciousness to remain among this much abused and insulted people.” A few days later, Joyce Junior and his minions rounded up five loyalists and, after loading them in a cart, proceeded out of town. Joyce was, according to Abigail Adams, “mounted on horseback with a red coat, a white wig, and a drawn sword, with drum and fife following. A concourse of people to the amount of 500 followed.” Once over the Roxbury line, Joyce “ordered the cart to be tipped up,” Adams recounted, “then told them if they were ever caught in town again it should be at the expense of their lives.”
    George Washington had little patience with