Bunker Hill

British North America could indeed act as one.
    —
    By September 24, Paul Revere was back in Boston with the good news from Philadelphia about the endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves. In an age when communication between the colonies could take days and even weeks, Revere provided the patriots with a decided advantage over the less nimble British. But the peripatetic silversmith was much more than the colonial equivalent of a Pony Express rider. Since he was a close friend of Joseph Warren and others, he knew as much as anyone about the patriot movement in Boston and as a consequence could speak with some authority when he carried messages to Philadelphia or, in the months ahead, to towns closer to home.
    Revere soon learned that in the two weeks since he departed for Philadelphia, Gage had been working steadily to prepare the town for a possible onslaught from the country. For reasons of safety, all vestiges of the provincial government that had formerly been in Salem (as well as Gage’s personal headquarters in Danvers) were moved back to Boston, which was now, for all intents and purposes, a city under siege. Six fieldpieces were rolled out to the Neck, and a dozen larger cannons planted at the town entrance. Warships were repositioned around the city. A more long-term project was the transformation of the crumbling fortifications at the town gate into what the patriots complained was an unnecessary “fortress.” The Fifty-Ninth Regiment, formerly stationed in Salem, was ordered to entrench themselves on either side of the Neck, where they provided a daunting gauntlet for anyone coming into or out of Boston.
    The country people, however, remained defiant after their staggering show of strength during the Powder Alarm. John Andrews told of the huge farmer who marched proudly into Boston between the ranks of soldiers lining the Neck, “looking very sly and contemptuously on one side and the other, which attracted the notice of the whole regiment.” The giant farmer stopped and addressed the regulars around him. “Ay, ay,” he crowed, “you don’t know what
boys
we have got in the country. I am near nine feet high and one of the smallest among ’em.” Another visiting farmer joined a group of soldiers engaged in target practice on the common. After astonishing them with his accuracy, he bragged, “I have got a boy at home that will toss up an apple and shoot out all the seeds as it’s coming down.”
    The country people were having their fun with the soldiers, but their bravado was not without a basis in truth. Native New Englanders (thanks to a healthier diet and living conditions) were statistically two inches taller than their European counterparts. For the regulars, confined to a mile-square island that had recently been surrounded by thousands upon thousands of militiamen, the ministry’s confident talk of the overwhelming power of the British military must have seemed more than a little hollow.
    The regulars represented one of the greatest armies in Europe, but this did not change the fact that the last time any of them had been in combat was more than twelve years before; indeed, most of them had never seen any action. It was true that the New England militia was made up, for the most part, of farmers, but many of them were farmers who knew how to fight. One patriot told of how two veterans of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg dismissed the new fortifications on the Neck as “mud-walls in comparison with what they have subdued.” If at some point the country people had to storm the ramparts Gage had constructed at the town gate, these old-timers claimed that “they would regard them no more than a beaver-dam.”
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    With an army of several thousand British regulars holding Boston, the town of Worcester, forty miles to the west, became the unofficial center of the provincial resistance movement. A county convention had emphasized the need to strengthen the preexisting system of town militias, which were soon mustering once, sometimes twice a week. What were known as “Minute Men”—elite groups culled from the towns’ militias—were created to be ready for battle in a minute’s notice. Not a new concept, the Minute Men dated back to the French and Indian War and were just one example of how the colonists’ experience in that earlier conflict had prepared them for what would become the American Revolution.
    Along with gunpowder, the provincial militiamen needed guns, and it was to Boston,