Bunker Hill

superstition, and personal animosities could overtake a town. Disagreements over monetary policy, banking schemes, and smallpox inoculation had divided the colonists. As the province’s population continued to climb, many towns, particularly those surrounding Boston, had begun to run out of land, creating tensions within families that forced many younger inhabitants to relocate to the hinterlands to the west, north, and east to what we now know as Maine. And then there was the perennial issue of religion.
    In the 1740s the itinerant English minister George Whitefield had aroused an evangelical fervor throughout the colonies that emphasized the individual’s emotional experience of God. Later referred to as the Great Awakening, this upsurge of religious feeling divided communities across Massachusetts into two groups: the “old lights,” who dismissed Whitefield as a sensationalist, and the “new lights,” who embraced the sense of the dramatic that Whitefield and his followers brought to the pulpit. In 1750 the future patriot leader Joseph Hawley led a bitter battle to remove the brilliant and controversial new-light minister Jonathan Edwards from the meeting at Northampton. In the years after Edwards’s ouster, passions remained so high in Northampton that Hawley felt compelled to issue a public apology for having sought the minister’s dismissal. That had been in 1760, and now, almost a decade and a half later, all these old divisions had been largely forgotten as colonists united in their opposition to the policies of the British ministry. It was more than a little ironic: an incipient rebellion had pulled these once-warring New Englanders together.
    There were exceptions, of course. All across the province there were those who chose to remain faithful to the crown. Financial considerations motivated many of the loyalists, particularly those who were employed by the king or had won commissions for their military services during the French and Indian War. Some were simply contrarians who couldn’t help but object to the patriots’ coercive demand for unity. Others, such as Daniel Leonard, had been lied to once too often to see much nobility in the clarion call for liberty. Josiah Quincy’s older and much less volatile brother, Samuel, shared Leonard’s disillusion with the patriot leaders. But that did not prevent him from loving his outspoken brother. “Our notions both of government and religion may be variant,” he wrote Josiah, “but perhaps are not altogether discordant.” Neither of them suffered from “a defect of conscience or uprightness of intention,” he insisted. They simply had different views of what was best for their country.
    —
    On the evening of August 30, John Andrews went for a walk along the mall of Boston Common. He spotted Governor Gage coming up a nearby street surrounded by a retinue of six officers, three aides-de-camp, and eight orderly sergeants. Gage’s entourage was stopped by a recently arrived mandamus councillor from Bridgewater, “a mere plow-jogger to look at,” scoffed Andrews. Once the governor had conferred with the newly exiled councillor, he continued to the head of Winter Street, where Brigadier Percy had rented a home beside the common. The two officers had matters to discuss, and “while [Gage] went in,” Andrews wrote, “his attendants of high and low rank stood in waiting at the gate like so many
menial slaves
.” Unknown to Andrews, and to just about everyone else in Boston, Gage had a plan that would soon have the entire province in an uproar.

CHAPTER FOUR

    The Alarm
    E ach town in Massachusetts had its own militia. Historically these companies of amateur soldiers had defended New England’s settlements from attacks by Native Americans, which had climaxed a hundred years before with King Philip’s War and the destruction of a third of the region’s English settlements. Although that conflict remained the high-water mark of violence in New England, clashes with the Indians had persisted throughout the eighteenth century. “I have seen a vessel enter the harbor of Boston,” the loyalist Peter Oliver wrote, “with a long string of hairy Indian scalps strung to the rigging, and waving in the wind.” The Indians had been the New Englanders’ traditional foe, but by the middle of the century the militiamen’s attention had shifted.
    During the French and Indian War, colonial and British soldiers had fought side by side against a common