Bunker Hill

the loyalists, but during the Siege of Boston he had acted decisively to stop the kind of tribal acts of intolerance that were Joyce Junior’s stock-in-trade. On November 5, 1775, the day when Bostonians traditionally held anti-Catholic demonstrations, the general had issued an order forbidding what he called “that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the effigy of the Pope.” Now that Canada and all its French Catholics were their potential allies, it was “void of common sense . . . to be insulting their religion.” With the help of Washington (who had already begun to rethink his relationship to African Americans), the New Englanders in his army could not help but begin to reconsider some of their old prejudices.
    It was perhaps not surprising that the new Continental Army was almost devoid of the Bostonians who had been at the forefront of the revolutionary movement over the course of the last decade. As Paul Revere observed to a friend in New York, “I find but few of the Sons of Liberty in the army.” Men who had relished dumping tea into Boston Harbor and tarring and feathering reprobate loyalists like John Malcom apparently had trouble fitting into the army of His Excellency George Washington.
    —
    The Revolution had begun as a profoundly conservative movement. The patriots had not wanted to create something new; they had wanted to preserve the status quo—the essentially autonomous community they had inherited from their ancestors—in the face of British attempts to forge a modern empire. Enlightenment rhetoric from England had provided them with new ideological grist, but what they had really been about, particularly when it came to the yeoman farmers of the country towns, was defending the way of life their forefathers had secured after more than a century of struggle with the French and Indians. But something had shifted with the arrival of the new general from Virginia. As Washington had made clear in his orders of November 5, 1775, his army was already moving in directions that would have been unthinkable to the New Englanders of old.
    With the approach of the summer of 1776, Bostonians began to emerge from the dark doldrums of the siege. Howe’s fleet of almost 150 vessels had sailed for Halifax at the end of March, but a few naval warships continued to linger near the Boston lighthouse to warn supply ships arriving from Britain that the army had removed to Nova Scotia. On June 13, the last of the men-of-war was finally forced to depart when cannons were installed on one of the harbor’s outlying islands. By the middle of July, word had reached the city of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
    They were no longer fighting simply to preserve their ancient liberties; they were fighting to create a new nation. The officers of Washington’s army had begun to talk in these terms as early as the fall of 1775, but not until the publication of Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
in January 1776 did the goal of independence begin to look like an inevitability. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine wrote. “A situation similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
    On July 18, the Declaration of Independence was made public for the first time in Boston. As sheriff, William Greenleaf was supposed to read all official proclamations. But the fifty-six-year-old Greenleaf had a weak voice. So he asked Thomas Crafts, the same man who had objected to the promotion of Henry Knox to colonel of the army’s artillery regiment, to “act as his herald.” A big man with a fiery red face, Crafts was now a colonel in Massachusetts’s artillery regiment, and he and Greenleaf stood together on the balcony of the Town House. Ahead of them was not only a large crowd but an unobstructed view of Long Wharf, where more than two years before General Gage and his regulars had first disembarked.
    Greenleaf read a passage from the declaration; Crafts repeated the words in his own booming voice, and so it went. According to Abigail Adams, who was in the crowd that day, “great attention was given to every word.” As soon as Crafts had finished, “the cry from the balcony was,” Abigail wrote, “God Save our American States and then three cheers which rended the air, the bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeared