Bunker Hill

natural she should desire to see her friends at New York, etc., yet she could have no sort of satisfaction in New England amidst riots, disorders, etc.” Hutchinson knew firsthand what the patriots of Boston could do to a magistrate trying to uphold the sovereignty of the crown, and he was deeply troubled by the revelation. “The whole letter,” he wrote, “discovers [i.e., discloses] greater anxiety and distress of mind than what appears from all the accounts we have received concerning him.”
    —
    On July 1 Gage learned that Admiral Montagu’s replacement, Admiral Samuel Graves, had arrived in Boston Harbor in his flagship
Preston
along with several transports bearing the Fifth and Thirty-Eighth Regiments. Commanding the Fifth was Earl Hugh Percy, the future second Duke of Northumberland, and on July 6, Gage returned to Boston to meet with Percy at Province House.
    Percy, just thirty-one years old, had served in Europe during the Seven Years War. He was cadaverously thin, nearsighted, and had a big bulbous nose. But he was also impeccably bred, immensely wealthy, and a talented soldier, and Gage entrusted the young general with stewardship of the forces gathered in Boston while he attended his duties in Salem.
    Boston was known for its love of liberty, its piety, and its prostitutes. In the town’s hilly northwestern corner was a lightly settled neighborhood that the soldiers dubbed Mount Whoredom. One afternoon at the end of July at an establishment known as “Miss Erskine’s,” fifteen British officers “committed,” John Andrews wrote, “all manner of enormous indecencies by exposing their anteriors, as well as their posteriors, at the open windows and doors, to the full view of the people . . . that happened to pass by.” By dusk, the party at Miss Erskine’s had begun to break up. Andrews, who happened to be walking nearby, saw two of the officers make their rampaging way through an old woman’s apple shop, “turning over all [her] things,” before assaulting two men with “their fists in their faces and damning them.” A few minutes later a group of five officers, all of them with their small swords drawn, came upon the wine cooper Abra Hunt and his wife. Abra was, according to Andrews, whose letters provide a rich and detailed portrait of a city under occupation, “a well-built, nervous fellow,” and when the soldiers began to comment on his wife, Abra took up his hickory walking stick and laid open one of the officers’ heads. A small crowd gathered, and before he could kill the officer with another blow, several of his fellow citizens restrained him. In the meantime, the rest of the soldiers began flourishing their swords and soon cleared the street of pedestrians, with the exception of Samuel Jarvis, Samuel Pitts, a chair maker named Fullerton, and “a negro fellow.” Pitts found himself fending off two of the officers with his cane, and might have been seriously wounded if a sword hadn’t struck the fence he was standing against. As it was, three of his knuckles were bloodied before he subdued the two soldiers, and the other Bostonians succeeded in disarming the remaining three officers.
    When informed of the disturbance, Percy was quick to promise the town’s selectmen that all the offending officers would be held accountable for their actions. For their part, Bostonians knew that it was important that they, too, do everything they could to keep their fellow citizens in line. Many of the soldiers looked to bait the townspeople into doing something that might be interpreted as an act of insurrection. “I hope the
strict
observance of a steady and peaceable conduct will disappoint their views,” John Andrews wrote, “for [I] am persuaded there is nothing they wish for more than an opportunity to deem us rebels; but God forbid they should ever be gratified.”
    With so many people put out of work by the Port Bill, the town selectmen worried that many of Boston’s poorer residents would no longer be able to feed themselves. But by early August, donations from across the country began to flood into the city. Eleven carts of fish came from Marblehead; two cargoes of rice from Charleston, South Carolina; and one thousand bushels of grain from Weathersfield, Connecticut. A Committee of Donations was formed to thank the towns for their gifts, and the letters, many written by Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, followed the pattern established by the Committee of Correspondence in