Bunker Hill

July and August that he was about to be arrested and sent to England for trial. Despite being urged “to keep out of the way,” Adams had continued to walk the streets of Boston and write his letters in the Selectmen’s Office, which served as headquarters for the Committee of Correspondence, and the people loved him for it. “They value him for his
good
sense,
great
abilities,
amazing
fortitude,
noble
resolution, and
undaunted
courage,” John Andrews wrote to his brother-in-law.
    Cushing, Samuel Adams, his cousin John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine boarded a yellow coach pulled by four horses with two white servants in front and four African Americans in back. Even though five British regiments were encamped in plain view, the delegates made a point of making “a very respectable parade” along the periphery of the common as they headed out that morning toward Watertown and, ultimately, Philadelphia.
    It was a proud and exciting moment for Boston’s patriots, but a disturbing one as well. How could they possibly fill the void left by even the temporary absence of Samuel Adams?
    —
    In early August, a celebrity arrived in Boston. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lee, forty-two, was not only a famous British army officer who, in addition to serving with distinction in America during the French and Indian War, had fought in both the Polish and Portuguese armies; he was one of Lord North’s most virulent critics. Although still technically a member of the British army, he had grown disillusioned with his professional prospects and was considering a permanent move to Virginia. He was now in the midst of a kind of exploratory tour of the Atlantic seaboard. Everywhere he went he praised the colonies as “the last asylum” of British liberty while leaving the distinct impression that if ever, God forbid, there should be a war between the mother country and her colonies, he was the natural choice to lead the Americans to victory.
    Lee decided to stay at the wooden two-story tavern on School Street called the Cromwell’s Head. In addition to being a notorious patriot gathering place, it was where, almost twenty years before, the young George Washington had stayed during his one and only trip to Boston. Washington had served with both Gage and Lee during the Braddock campaign back in 1755, and if Lee had a native-born rival for command of the colonial forces, it was George Washington.
    Winningly uncouth and eccentric, Lee was also highly intelligent and impulsive. He considered the novelist Laurence Sterne, author of
Tristram Shandy
, a good friend but had also spent several years amid the wilds of Pennsylvania and New York. The Indians had given him the name “Boiling Water,” and he was reported to have had two children by the daughter of a Mohawk chief. This was just the military figure to capture the imaginations of the city’s patriot leaders, and on August 6 Lee sent his old friend Thomas Gage a letter.
    Lee made the paradoxical claim that it was the “warm zeal and ardor” of his affection for Gage that had prevented him from making any effort to visit him. He then proceeded to inform the new royal governor that he had been duped by the British government.
    I believe, Sir, I have had an opportunity of knowing the way and tricks of the cabinet better than you. I make no doubt but they have been all played off upon you. May fortune or some God extricate you from . . . their clutches. I cannot pretend to say whether or not the Americans will be successful in their struggles for liberty, but from what I have seen in my progress through the colonies, from the noble spirit pervading all orders of men from the first estate and gentlemen to the poorest planters, I am almost persuaded they must be victorious and most devoutly wish they may; for if the machinations of their enemies prevail, the bright goddess liberty must fly off from the face of the Earth.
    For Gage, who was then trying to implement the Coercive Acts from his temporary seat in Salem, it must have been maddening to know that Lee was in Boston doing everything he could to make him look like a fool. And then, on August 15, yet another colorful veteran of the French and Indian War, Colonel Israel Putnam, fifty-six, from Pomfret, Connecticut, arrived in Boston with a herd of 130 sheep for the town’s poor. Like Lee, Putnam was an outsize, almost mythological character. The citizens of Pomfret told the story of how he had rid the town of its last