Bunker Hill

remaining wolf. With a musket in one hand and a torch in the other and with a rope tied around his feet in case he needed to be quickly extricated, he had climbed into the wolf’s den and dispatched the snarling mother and her cubs. During the war with France, he had been a member of the famed Rogers’s Rangers and might have been burned to death by the Caughnawaga Indians if not for a fortuitous shower of rain.
    Charles Lee was delighted to see the old warrior, and the two of them had the temerity to visit the regiments camped on the common, where they traded stories with friends. Inevitably the British officers asked whether Lee and Putnam had come to Boston to fight. The patriot Thomas Young assured Samuel Adams that both soldiers left the impression that should matters come to a head, the colonials—not the British regulars—could count on their support. Young also reported that when Lee finally left Boston on August 17, “Never man parted from us with a more general regret than General Lee.”
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    By the end of August, Gage was getting unsettling reports from the western portion of the province. Safely removed from the regiments collected in Boston and Salem, the country towns were making sure that the Coercive Acts were, in the words of John Andrews, “a blank piece of paper and not more.” It had started as early as June, when sixty representatives from several towns in Berkshire County met at Stockbridge and came up with a series of resolutions that became the model for counties throughout the province. In addition to demanding a boycott of British goods, the delegates meeting at Stockbridge drew up a declaration of rights along with a pledge to maintain their own form of local government. A month later, Worcester held a similar convention. Whereas the people of the Berkshires had emphasized the need for maintaining order, those in Worcester County were more concerned that each town maintain a company of well-trained and well-armed militia.
    Instead of the Port Bill, it was the arrival of the Massachusetts Government Act in August that pushed the province into a state of what Gage deemed open rebellion. One after the other, in town after town, mandamus councillors were forced to either resign or flee to the safety of Boston. On August 23, Daniel Leonard began to realize that it was no longer safe for him in Taunton and quietly slipped away for Boston. The following day two thousand men assembled on the Taunton town green and would have pulled down Leonard’s house if not for the pathetic pleas of his aged father. In Great Barrington, 120 miles to the west, citizens shut down the local courts. In Salem, Gage found himself in a standoff with the Committee of Correspondence, which had dared to call a town meeting even though the gathering was now, according to the Government Act, illegal. Gage had the offending committee members arrested and threatened to jail those who refused to put up bail. When it began to look as if about three thousand militiamen might forcibly “rescue the committee,” Gage had no choice but to call off his regulars and forget the matter.
    A few days later, the residents of Danvers, which now served as Gage’s adopted home, also called a town meeting. John Andrews gleefully reported that the meeting was continued for several needless hours just “to see if [the governor] would interrupt them.” When Gage was told of the town’s outrageous behavior, he was reported to have cried, “Damn ’em! I won’t do anything about it unless his Majesty sends me more troops.”
    The following day, Gage traveled to Boston to ensure that the superior court was allowed to sit. Although the judges made an appearance, the jurors refused to cooperate, and the session proved an embarrassing failure. “Civil government is nearly [at] its end,” Gage wrote Lord Dartmouth, “the courts of justice expiring one after the other. . . . We shall shortly be without either law or legislative power. . . . Nothing that is said at present can palliate. Conciliating, moderation, reasoning [are] over.”
    In just about every town outside Boston it had become impossible to support, publicly at least, the British government. A unanimity unlike anything ever experienced in the previous hundred years had swept across Massachusetts. Up until this point, internal division and unrest had been a long-standing part of colonial life. The Salem witch trials were only the most notorious example of how rumor,