Bunker Hill

of the slave Mark had once hung in chains) and headed west to Cambridge.
    —
    They found about four thousand people—almost three times Cambridge’s entire population—gathered in the large open field that served as the town’s common. Once the farmers heard that the rumors about the six dead militiamen were false, they had agreed to leave their weapons in Watertown before proceeding to Cambridge. With no regulars to fight, they turned their attention to making sure Cambridge’s mandamus councillors renounced their posts. At that moment, all eyes were turned to the steps of the courthouse, where two of the councillors stood in the hot summer sun. One of these was the physician and alchemist Samuel Danforth, who previously claimed to have discovered the secret to immortality known as the philosopher’s stone. The discovery had apparently not enabled the seventy-eight-year-old councillor to speak in anything other than a barely audible rasp, and Warren’s fellow committee member Thomas Young marveled that “not a whisper interrupted the low voice of that feeble old man from being heard by the whole body.” Judge Joseph Lee also renounced his position as mandamus councillor and later remarked that “he never saw so large a number of people together and preserve so peaceable order before in his life.” But the quiet was not to last.
    Around noon, a gentleman in a chaise came upon the crowd gathered on the Cambridge Common. He was on his way from Salem to Boston, and since the road along the common was filled with people, he was forced to pause before continuing on to the bridge across the Charles River. This happened to be Benjamin Hallowell, fifty-four, a member of the customs board who was almost as despised as former governor Thomas Hutchinson. Hallowell had insisted, it was said, that ships with provisions for Boston’s poor be banned from entering the harbor, even though the Port Act did not technically forbid them to. In his youth he’d been a noted privateer captain and had accumulated enough prize money during the French and Indian War that he’d built a big and sumptuous house on Hanover Street. He’d married into the well-to-do Boylston family, and as his role as customs officer made it dangerous to live in Boston, his wife Mary used some of her inheritance to purchase a house in the portion of Roxbury known as Jamaica Plain. Brash and hotheaded (John Adams described him as a “Hotspur”), he believed it was time Gage used the regulars to teach these seditious people a lesson. But even Hallowell seems to have been taken aback by the prospect of passing through a crowd of four thousand patriot militiamen.
    He soon realized that these were mostly farmers from the outlying country towns and therefore unaware of his reputation in Boston. He became hopeful of making it to the river without incident. But then someone recognized him.
    Isaiah Thomas, the patriot writer and editor who in June had published the poem attributed to Mercy Scollay, was in Cambridge that day. According to Hallowell, Thomas cried out, “Damn you, how do you like us now, you Tory son of a bitch” as he made it known to anyone who would listen that Hallowell was “an enemy to the country.” Soon about 160 men on horseback were on his trail, “having taken,” Hallowell wrote, “a resolution to destroy me.”
    Joseph Warren and his fellow committee members realized that the pursuit of Hallowell could very well ruin what had so far been an exemplary demonstration of the people’s “patience, temperance, and fortitude.” Thomas Young and others jumped on their own horses and did their best to dissuade those at the head of the posse that “the shedding of one man’s blood would answer no good purpose.” Most of the riders gave up the chase, but a group of eight or ten refused to turn back.
    Hallowell had succeeded in crossing the Charles and putting about three miles between him and Cambridge when the group of enraged horsemen caught up to him and his black servant, who was following the chaise on a horse. A man named Bradshaw was in the lead and told him to stop so that he could speak with him. When Hallowell refused, Bradshaw rode up beside the horse that was pulling the chaise and began to beat the animal over the head as he tried to grab its reins. By this time, Hallowell had a pistol in his hand, and whenever Bradshaw or the others approached, he aimed the weapon at them till they moved away. Bradshaw later claimed