Bunker Hill

where local merchants and gunsmiths possessed large stockpiles of weapons, that many of the country people came to secure muskets and other small arms. Since martial law had not yet been declared in Massachusetts, there were limits to what Thomas Gage could legally do to oppose the patriots’ efforts to prepare for war, and in the weeks after the Powder Alarm, John Andrews estimated the outflow of muskets and pistols from Boston to be no less than a hundred per day.
    What the patriots really needed if they had any hope of one day opposing the British army and navy were cannons similar to the ones that currently loomed from the fortifications and ships in and around Boston. However, many town militias did not yet have adequate supplies of muskets, let alone fieldpieces and larger artillery. The one exception was Boston’s “train,” an artillery company within its militia regiment, under the command of Major Adino Paddock, a loyalist who was not about to let the company’s brass fieldpieces fall into patriot hands.
    Two of the brass cannons were stored in a newly built British gun house at the edge of the common. On September 16, several Bostonians had the audacity to approach the house in broad daylight and, as the guards stepped outside, liberate the cannons, each weighing around five hundred pounds. After being lugged across a small yard, the artillery pieces were temporarily hidden in the wood bin of the nearby South Writing School before being smuggled out of the city. The British sergeant guarding the gun house was overheard to exclaim, “I’ll be damned if these people won’t steal the teeth out of your head while you’re on guard!”
    One of the Bostonians who helped carry the cannons was the tanner William Dawes, who had a button on the cuff of his shirt jammed deep into his wrist by the weight of the brass barrel. After attempting to ignore the increasingly painful injury for several days, he finally visited Dr. Joseph Warren.
    “Dawes,” Warren asked, “how and when was this done?”
    When Dawes proved reluctant to answer him, Warren said, “You are right not to tell me. I had better not know.”
    One night later that fall, several old and very rusty iron cannons were secretly placed on a flat-bottomed boat and floated into the North End’s Mill Pond. The plan was to row them out into the harbor and up into a creek in Cambridge, where they could be transported into the interior of the province. Unfortunately the boat became trapped by the outgoing tide and was abandoned on the mudflats. The next morning, Admiral Graves confiscated the cannons, but this did not prevent the patriot owner from suing for their return, and in a surprise decision, the Admiralty Court determined that the navy “had no right by virtue of the Port Bill to stop or molest any boats carrying merchandise.”
    For Gage, the patriots’ complaints about British tyranny seemed utterly absurd since British law was what allowed them to work so assiduously at preparing themselves for a revolution. Never before (and perhaps since) had the inhabitants of a city under military occupation enjoyed as much freedom as the patriots of Boston.
    —
    One of Gage’s biggest concerns was providing winter quarters for an army that by the end of the fall was approaching three thousand men. He had originally planned to build barracks on the common. At first the town selectmen had approved of the idea, since the barracks would mean the soldiers did not have to take over houses in town, while the building project would provide much-needed work for the city’s carpenters. What the selectmen had not taken into account were the country people.
    As had become clear during the Powder Alarm, the most radical patriots were no longer in Boston; they were in the towns outside the city. Many of these country people believed that Boston should be abandoned by its inhabitants so that they could attack the soldiers and loyalists who remained. Perhaps not surprisingly, the country people did not agree with the Boston selectmen’s decision to cooperate with General Gage in the building of barracks, and a committee of representatives from the outlying towns convinced both the Boston selectmen and the Committee of Correspondence that the barracks should not be built. Andrews reported that Gage was heard to complain that “he can do very well with the Boston Selectmen but the damn country committees plague his soul out.”
    In desperation, the general was