Bunker Hill

stones when he received word of Lexington and Concord. That had not prevented him from riding almost forty miles to Cambridge, where he presided over his first council of war on the night of April 20. Over the course of the next few days, Ward began to organize his rudimentary army.
    General John Thomas, fifty-one, a doctor from Kingston who had served with distinction in the French and Indian War, was put in charge of the provincials stationed in Roxbury. Israel Putnam was the already mythologized warrior from Connecticut who had visited Boston the year before. He had been plowing his fields on April 20 when, at a little before noon, he received word of Lexington and Concord. He handed the plow over to his son and was in Cambridge by the following day. He was soon ranging restlessly up and down the lines stretching from the ridge of hills overlooking the Mystic River to the inner reaches of the Charles River.
    In the days to come, militiamen arrived from towns in not only Massachusetts and Connecticut but Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. The Provincial Congress eventually decided to raise a New England–wide army of as many as 30,000 men, with Massachusetts’s quota increased to 13,600. Having raised armies in the past for the many wars against the French and Indians, the region’s leaders had considerable experience in recruiting soldiers. Traditionally, the officers did the actual recruiting, with the officer’s rank based on how many soldiers he could convince to enlist (a captain, for example, had to raise fifty men; a lieutenant, twenty-five). Since officers typically recruited in their hometowns, each company tended to be made up of neighbors, friends, and relatives, all of whom looked with considerable suspicion on anyone whom they didn’t already know. And yet with companies of militiamen already beginning to arrive from towns throughout the colony and beyond, Cambridge and Roxbury were rapidly becoming the chaotic centers of what was, for New England, a remarkably diverse gathering of humanity. Included in this new army would be farmers, sailors, artisans, merchants, doctors, lawyers, some free African Americans (the Provincial Congress quickly determined that the recruitment of slaves was “inconsistent with the principles that are to be supported and reflect dishonor on this colony”), and Native Americans from western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
    It was an exciting time—the kind of time when no one knew what was going to happen next. Benjamin Russell was the thirteen-year-old student at Boston’s Queen Street School who had followed Percy’s brigade out of Boston. Once in Cambridge he and his classmates had decided to spend the afternoon playing games on the town’s common, only to discover on the evening of April 19 that they were now trapped outside Boston with no way to communicate with their parents. Instead of despairing, they volunteered to serve as errand boys for the officers of the emerging army. Russell would not hear from his parents for another three months.
    —
    Around sunset on Friday, April 21, as a meeting of the Committee of Safety drew to a close in Cambridge, Benjamin Church announced, “I am determined to go into Boston tomorrow.” The other committee members were dumbfounded. “Are you serious, Dr. Church?” Joseph Warren asked. “They will hang you if they catch you in Boston.” Church was insistent. “I am serious,” he said, “and am determined to go at all adventures.”
    The discussion continued, and when Church, who like many of them had family in the city, insisted that he was willing to risk possible capture, Warren said, “If you are determined, let us make some business for you.” The provincial army was in desperate need of medical equipment to tend to the wounded, which included several British prisoners, and Church was given the mission to secure whatever Gage and his medical staff might be willing to give.
    Church appears to have prepared the way for this announcement by providing what he hoped was incontrovertible proof that he was a man to be trusted. Paul Revere was serving as the committee’s messenger, and the morning after Lexington and Concord, Church had shown him “some blood on his stocking,” claiming that it had “spurted on him from a man who was killed near him as he was urging the militia on.” “I argued with myself,” Revere later remembered, “if a man will risk his life in a cause, he must be a friend to that