Bunker Hill

regulars knew where they were headed.
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    Shortly after 4:00 a.m. in the predawn darkness of Thursday, September 1, a battalion of about three hundred soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Maddison was assembled on the common and marched to Long Wharf, where a fleet of thirteen boats was waiting for them. They were soon being rowed across the harbor to the mouth of the Mystic River along the northern edge of Charlestown.
    About three miles up the river, past the point where the Mystic was joined by the smaller Malden River, was Ten Hills Farm. Originally owned by Governor John Winthrop, this beautiful property had been named for the mini–mountain range that rose up along the Mystic River’s western shore, providing panoramic views of the harbor from Cobble, Winter, and the highest of them all, Prospect Hill. Just a mile west from the landing at Ten Hills Farm was the Quarry Hill arsenal, where Sheriff David Phipps had eight wagons waiting to be loaded with the king’s powder. Sprouting protectively from the top of the conical stone structure was one of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rods.
    Gunpowder in the eighteenth century was much more volatile than it later became. Shoes with any metal on the soles that might cause a spark on the powderhouse’s stone floor had to be removed, and since a flame of any kind was forbidden, the soldiers were forced to wait for daybreak, when it was light enough to begin removing the barrels and loading up the wagons. As the powder was transported to the boats waiting on the Mystic River, Sheriff Phipps led a small detachment of soldiers to Cambridge. Once they’d borrowed some horses from a local tavern keeper, they hauled off two of the province’s fieldpieces and headed across the bridge at the Charles River and marched the eight miles through Roxbury to Boston. In the meantime, the rest of the regulars transported the gunpowder by boat down the Mystic River to the Castle in Boston Harbor.
    By then, word of Brigadier Brattle’s letter had already spread through Boston and beyond. As Gage perhaps intended, Brattle, not the governor, became the object of the people’s scorn once it became known that the king’s powder and some fieldpieces had been removed by several hundred British soldiers. A crowd began to assemble in Cambridge and soon made its way to the group of seven magnificent homes known as Tory Row. Situated about a mile from the Cambridge Common on the road to Watertown, these houses enjoyed grand views of the Charles River. The children of the original owners had intermarried to the point that Tory Row had become one of the most exclusive, closely knit communities in America. Brigadier Brattle lived in the house closest to the common, and it’s likely that even before the crowd arrived, he had mounted his horse and fled for Boston, where he quickly decided that he had no choice but to retreat all the way to the Castle.
    By that afternoon and evening, the crowd in Cambridge had surrounded the house of the province’s attorney general, Jonathan Sewall. Sewall had also left for Boston, but someone inside the house fired a warning shot. Some windows were broken, but for the most part the crowd, made up of “some boys and negroes,” according to one account, showed little interest in pressing the matter and eventually disbanded.
    At some point, however, a rumor was started: when the British soldiers arrived in Cambridge to take the powder, it was claimed, the local militia had opposed them. A skirmish ensued, and the regulars killed six militiamen.
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    The news of six dead militiamen astounded everyone who heard it, and by midnight the rumor had reached almost forty miles west to Worcester. Even as the rumor headed west, it spread to the north and east to New Hampshire and to Maine; it also headed south to Rhode Island and Connecticut. By early that Friday morning, virtually every town within a fifty-mile radius of Boston was in a tumult as its militiamen prepared to march to the “relief of their brethren.” Soon about twenty thousand, some said as many as forty thousand, men were streaming toward Boston.
    On the night of September 1 a merchant named McNeil was staying at a tavern in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, about thirty-eight miles from Boston. Around midnight he was awakened by a violent rapping on the tavern door. He heard the tavern keeper being told “the doleful story that the powder was taken, six men killed, and all the people