Bunker Hill

belonging to the Cutler family, approached the house of George Prentiss, one of the many terrified women gathered inside asked, “Are you going to kill us, Ishmael?” No, Ishmael replied; he wasn’t there to kill them; he was there to see whether his owner’s wife, Mrs. Cutler, was safe.
    A similar fear overtook the women of Framingham, who armed themselves with “axes and pitchforks and clubs” and assembled in the Edgell house, convinced that “the Negroes were coming to massacre them all.” One resident later attributed this “strange panic” to “a lingering memory of the earlier Indian alarms . . . , aided by the feeling of terror awakened by their defenseless condition and the uncertainty of the issue of the pending fight.”
    Whatever the source of this terrible fright might have been, it marked a disturbing transformation among the citizens of Massachusetts. Reverend West of Needham claimed that prior to Lexington and Concord, his parishioners had been “mild and gentle.” Once their loved ones began to die, however, these same parishioners became “ferocious and cruel—at least towards all those they suspected as unfriendly to their cause.” In town after town, the battle lines were being drawn.
    —
    Around seven in the evening, Percy and his column reached the safety of Charlestown, where a height of land known as Bunker Hill provided the defensive ground they needed to convince the provincials to discontinue the pursuit. It was dusk, dark enough, William Heath remembered, “as to render the flashes of the muskets very visible.”
    Heath later came to the conclusion that there could have been a very different result that evening. If only Captain Timothy Pickering and his men from Salem had “arrived a few minutes sooner,” Heath wrote, “the left flank of the British must have been greatly exposed and suffered considerably; perhaps their retreat would have been cut off.” In other words, if Pickering had only shown the proper spirit, April 19, 1775, might have ended with a decisive American victory.
    In his defense, Pickering claimed that he had marched his men from Salem as quickly as was reasonably possible. But like James Nichols, the Englishman from Lincoln who decided that he could not fire a musket in anger at the North Bridge in Concord, Pickering had his reasons to avoid a confrontation. Even though he had been instrumental in organizing the militia not only in Salem but throughout New England, he was not part of the patriot inner circle. For one thing, his father, Timothy Pickering Sr., was an outspoken loyalist. But Timothy Pickering Jr. was too “assuming . . . and headstrong” to let even his own father influence what he decided to do. In the future, Pickering would become one of George Washington’s most trusted officers, and he eventually served as secretary of state under both Washington and John Adams. But on the evening of April 19 he still believed, he wrote a friend, that “a pacification upon honorable terms is practicable.”
    Rather than charging into Cambridge and cutting Percy off, Pickering lingered on Winter Hill, more than a mile away, where he stood at the head of his men and looked toward Charlestown in the deepening twilight. Pickering was so nearsighted that if he didn’t wear his glasses, “the smallest object he could discern . . . was a regiment.” One of his officers later remembered seeing him “riding along at night with the light of the campfires flashing on his spectacles.” Playing across the lenses of his glasses that evening on Winter Hill were the muzzle flashes of British and provincial muskets. Pickering looked through those pieces of glittering glass and saw not a war to be won but a reason to talk.
    He was, it turned out, in the minority.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    No Business but That of War
    B y the morning of Thursday, April 20, hundreds if not thousands of militiamen had flooded into Cambridge and Roxbury, with thousands more on the way from towns across Massachusetts. With the exception of the harbor, which was dominated by Admiral Graves’s warships, British-occupied Boston had been effectively surrounded by militiamen from the country. All the while, terrified noncombatants began to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the British regulars stationed inside Boston.
    That morning, after a day and a night listening to the distant firing of guns, the Bostonian Sarah Winslow Deming was shaking so