Bunker Hill

forced to reach out to John Hancock for help in convincing Boston’s carpenters to ignore the dictates of the various committees and resume work on the barracks on the common. For Gage, it was the ultimate humiliation. After having dismissed the arrogant merchant for the disrespect he had shown him as commander of the cadets, he was now reduced to pleading for Hancock’s assistance, which the patriot leader quite gladly refused.
    Making Gage’s position all the more untenable was the distressing lack of living quarters in Boston. Many patriot families had already left the city, but with the arrival of so many loyalist refugees, there were, Andrews judged, not even half the number of homes needed to house the soldiers and their families. Out of desperation, empty warehouses on the wharves and even rum distilleries, filled with the awful stench of the decaying organic matter left after fermenting molasses, were converted into barracks.
    As the fall turned to winter, those still confined to their tents on Boston Common, which included many of the soldiers’ wives and children, began to die. A new graveyard was established at the far corner of the common, and in only a few months’ time more than one hundred people had been buried. By December the soldiers had moved into their winter quarters, but that did not prevent disease from taking a terrible toll, and by January the regulars were dying at the rate of three to four a day. The ready availability of cheap rum, which the patriots were happy to foist on the regulars, was also killing its share of men. “Depend on it . . . ,” wrote one British commander, “[rum] will destroy more of us than the Yankees will.”
    Desertion had always been a problem, but now outright mutiny had become a genuine possibility. Already, one deserter had been executed on the common, his bullet-riddled body laid out on top of his coffin for all the regulars to see, and many soldiers were so brutally flogged that their ribs were laid bare—a horribly painful injury that often led to kidney problems and death. A cannon was moved into the center of town in the event, John Andrews claimed, of an uprising on the part of the troops—an irony that was not lost on anyone in this city, where the Boston Massacre was still vividly remembered.
    Gage now realized that his earlier claim that he could contain Massachusetts with a mere four regiments had been nothing but a deluded boast. By the end of October, he was writing Lord Dartmouth that no less than twenty thousand soldiers were required to retake New England. He knew this might seem like an absurd figure to the ministry back in London, but he assured Dartmouth that such a large army “will in the end save Great Britain both blood and treasure.”
    —
    The country people had succeeded in shutting down the colony’s legislature and courts. Trapped in Boston, Gage was powerless to exert any control beyond the borders of the city. Each town had its own selectmen to manage local affairs, but some kind of colony-wide political body had to be created, or the patriot movement would grind to a disorganized halt. If Gage decided to break out of Boston and seize more of their munitions, it might be necessary to defend themselves from the British soldiers. Each town had its own militia, but at some point the colony might need to raise its own provincial army. The soldiers would need to be paid; provisions and equipment would need to be purchased, and for that to happen taxes needed to be collected. An extralegal government of some sort must be created, and in October a new era arrived in Massachusetts with the sitting of the first Provincial Congress in Concord.
    Representatives from throughout the province, many of them former members of the General Court, traveled to Concord, where they convened at the town’s meetinghouse. “You would have thought yourself in an assembly of Spartans or ancient Romans,” Joseph Warren enthused in a letter to a patriot friend, “had you been a witness to the ardor which inspired those who spoke upon the important business they were transacting.”
    In truth, however, the 260 members of the Provincial Congress were deeply divided. Some thought they should revert to Massachusetts’s original charter from 1629, which would allow them to elect their own governor. It would be a way to get the colony functioning again without declaring independence from Britain. Others saw this as a needless ruse—why not simply