Bunker Hill

consensus was emerging among the inhabitants of British North America—a consensus that was bound to have astounding and yet frightening consequences.
    He began by referring to the way their cumulative breaths rose like smoke toward the ceiling several stories above their heads. He called it “the spirit that vapors within these walls” and warned that it would take more than hot air—“popular resolves, popular harangues, popular acclamations, and popular vapor”—to “vanquish our foes.” Given Great Britain’s military strength, it behooved them all to think carefully about what they were about to do: “Let us weigh and consider before we advance to those measures which must bring on the most trying and terrific struggle this country ever saw.”
    If anything, Quincy was calling for caution, but the mere mention of a possible war with the mother country was enough to prompt the staunch loyalist Harrison Gray to warn “the young man in the gallery” that he risked being prosecuted for treason for his “intemperate language.” Quincy, who along with John Adams had successfully defended the British soldiers on trial after the Boston Massacre three years before, responded, “If the old gentleman on the floor intends, by his warning to ‘the young man in the gallery’ to utter only a friendly voice in the spirit of paternal advice, I thank him. If his object be to terrify and intimidate, I despise him. Personally, perhaps, I have less concern than any one present in the crisis which is approaching. The seeds of dissolution are thickly planted in my constitution. They must soon ripen. I feel how short is the day that is allotted to me.”
    At that moment, some men disguised as Indians could be seen through the meetinghouse windows heading down Milk Street toward the wharves. The bitter rain that had been falling most of the day had stopped, and a bright moon shone in the darkening sky. The words that followed were so eerily prescient that they were still being repeated almost eighty years later by a Bostonian who’d been there that day in the east gallery. “I see the clouds which now rise thick and fast upon our horizon,” Quincy said, “the thunders roll, and the lightnings play, and to that God who rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm I commit my country.”
    —
    The last decade had been a time of growing discord and anxiety. Many looked to the passage of the Stamp Act in the summer of 1765 as the start of all their troubles, but it went back much further than that. From the very first, with the arrival of the original Puritan settlers in 1630, the inhabitants of Boston had seen themselves as an exceptional and essentially independent people. Their projected “city on a hill” was to be a shining example of what could be accomplished when men and women lived according to the true dictates of God beyond the reach of the Stuart kings and their bishops.
    There had been complications along the way: internal religious controversies, conflicts with other settlements, a revolution back home in England, and in 1675, the outbreak of a ruinous war with the Indians; but through it all the colonists of Massachusetts had clung to the conviction that they constituted an autonomous enclave. In 1676, in the midst of King Philip’s War, the British agent Edward Randolph traveled to Boston and spoke with Massachusetts governor John Leverett. Even though his colony had been decimated by the ongoing struggle with the Indians, Leverett, whose blood-soaked leather battle jacket still exists, insisted that Massachusetts was, in essence, independent. “He freely declared to me,” Randolph wrote to King Charles II, “that the laws made by your Majesty and your Parliament obligeth them in nothing . . . , that your Majesty ought not to retrench their liberties, but may enlarge them if your Majesty please.” A hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the governor of Massachusetts boldly insisted that the laws enacted by the colony’s legislature superseded those of even Parliament.
    Leverett may have talked as if his colony were free to do whatever it wanted, but the truth proved quite different. It soon became apparent that the two-year war with the Indians had devastated Massachusetts. A third of its towns had been burned to the ground; only after decades would the colony’s median income level approach the prewar level. Having virtually annihilated their closest Indian allies, the New