Bunker Hill

uncontrollably that she had trouble standing, as did her two female houseguests, one of whom she expected to “fall into hysteric fits every minute,” while the other clung desperately to “anything she could grasp.” They must, Deming wrote in a diary account of her ordeal, flee this “city of destruction” and take their chances in the country. Deming’s husband insisted on remaining, at least temporarily, in Boston, but he was willing to drive his wife and her companions out of the city in a chaise before he returned to make sure their home and personal effects were safe. Soon the Demings had joined a long line of carriages and carts waiting to exit the city. After making it past four different British sentries, they were finally on the road to Roxbury. Deming’s husband asked where she wanted to go next; Sarah told him to let the horse decide. The horse followed the road up to Meetinghouse Hill, which was crowded, Deming wrote, with militiamen “old, young, and middle-aged.” She was struck by the “pleasant sedateness on all their countenances.” Instead of being encouraged by the provincials’ presence, Deming was reminded of “sheep going to the slaughter.”
    Harvard professor John Winthrop and his wife Hannah had spent the night in a house in Fresh Pond, about a mile from their home in Cambridge, with between seventy and eighty anguished wives and their children. As Cambridge filled up with militiamen from as far away as Worcester, they and three others decided to head to Andover. They took turns riding and then walking beside “one poor tired horse chaise” as they made their way through what Hannah described as “the bloody field at Menotomy . . . strewn with mangled bodies.” “We met one affectionate father with a cart,” she wrote, “looking for his murdered son and picking up his neighbors who had fallen in battle.” Another New Englander traveling in the opposite direction noted that the houses “were all perforated with balls and the windows broken. Horses, cattle and swine lay dead around. Such were the dreadful trophies of war for twenty miles.” It was no wonder “all [was] confusion,” Deacon William Tudor of Brighton reported. “The rumor was that if the soldiers came out again they would burn, kill, and destroy all as they marched.” Like Sarah Deming, who spent the night with the Reverend William Gordon in Roxbury before traveling to Rhode Island and then to Connecticut, they must turn their backs on the city that had once been the center of their lives.
    —
    Panic and confusion had also gripped the British soldiers in Boston. It was close to midnight by the time Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, his right arm swollen and caked in blood, crossed the harbor and staggered up the crooked street to the house where he lived with several officers. As he sat on a chair, stunned and famished, waiting for a pot of tea to brew, he was besieged by people wanting to know about the events of that terrible day. By his own estimation, he had marched “about sixty miles in [the] course of twenty-four hours,” almost half of those miles “after I was wounded and without a morsel of victuals.” It was no wonder, then, that when someone asked about Lieutenant Sutherland, who had received a musket ball in the chest at the North Bridge, Lister dispensed with all tact and said exactly what he assumed to be the case. “I replied [that] I supposed by that time he was dead.” Unknown to Lister, Sutherland’s wife was standing behind him, and she “immediately dropped down in [a] swoon.”
    That night Admiral Graves urged General Gage to allow his warships to blast Charlestown and Roxbury to pieces so that the British army could seize the high ground to the north and south. Gage insisted that his army was not strong enough to undertake such a bold move. The best that they could do was to dig in and prepare for the attack that they all assumed was about to come from the provincials.
    —
    On the morning of Thursday, April 20, Captain Timothy Pickering was asked to attend a meeting in Cambridge. In addition to key militia officers, the group included members of the Committee of Safety, most notably Dr. Joseph Warren. The topic for discussion that morning was nothing less than
what to do next
.
    After watching Percy’s retreat into Charlestown the night before, Pickering had assumed that the fighting at Lexington and Concord was the equivalent of the Stamp Act Riots of 1765 and the Boston