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Bunker Hill

Bunker Hill

Titel: Bunker Hill Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Nathaniel Philbrick
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cause.”
    Still, the decision to cross the British lines was a bold one, even by the standards of Benjamin Church, who would have the audacity to meet with Gage the next day at the governor’s residence in Province House. But as Church knew better than anyone, Warren and the other patriot leaders were too preoccupied with trying to stay ahead of each new and potentially catastrophic development to question his motivations. For now at least, they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
    —
    Gage had been reluctant to do anything more than hunker down for a siege—with one notable exception. On Thursday, April 20, he launched a rescue mission. Back in January, he had sent a force of about a hundred regulars under the command of Captain Nesbitt Balfour to Marshfield, where they had based themselves at the estate of Nathaniel Ray Thomas (a distant relative of provincial general John Thomas). Balfour and his men had enjoyed a quiet winter and spring (even finding the time to construct an elaborate wine cabinet in the cellar of Thomas’s house) until the fighting at Lexington and Concord inspired more than a thousand militiamen from the towns surrounding Marshfield to descend on the loyalist stronghold.
    On the morning of April 20, Gage ordered Admiral Graves to provide the vessels needed to extract Balfour and his men from Marshfield. Soon the schooner
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and two recently confiscated wood sloops were on their way to the rugged piece of coastline at the mouth of the Cut River known as Brant Rock. Despite having an overwhelming numerical advantage, the militiamen surrounding the Thomas estate were reluctant to engage the British regulars. A message was sent to General Thomas in Roxbury requesting that he lead them in what might prove to be a battle that put the previous day’s fighting to shame. Although General Ward needed him in Roxbury, Thomas was able to provide the militia forces in Marshfield with “eleven hundred brave men and cannon.” By the time the provincial reinforcements arrived, Balfour’s detachment, along with a hundred or so loyalists, had bluffed their way onto the three rescue vessels and were headed for Boston. The lesson was clear: even the most enthusiastic and well-meaning militiamen were military amateurs who needed competent officers to lead them.
    —
    Back on the morning of April 19, Committee of Safety member Joseph Palmer had given a professional post rider named Isaac Bissell a letter with a brief description of the engagement at Lexington Green. Paul Revere may have helped spread the word that the regulars were coming on the night of April 18, but Bissell helped to spread the news of the fighting at Lexington across the Atlantic seaboard. According to tradition, he was in Worcester by early that afternoon, his exhausted horse falling down dead in front of the town’s meetinghouse. From there, Bissell went to Hartford, Connecticut, and by the evening of the next day, Thursday, April 20, another rider had carried the message to New London. By the evening of April 21 the message had reached New York City; by 5:00 p.m. of April 24, it had reached Philadelphia.
    Everywhere the news was received, it caused a sensation. At Brunswick, North Carolina, word of the fighting at Lexington was forwarded to Charleston, South Carolina, with the note, “I request, for the good of our country and the welfare of our lives and liberties and fortunes, you will not lose a moment’s time.” By the first week in May the news had spread south to Georgia and west across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. When a group of frontiersmen camped on the middle fork of Elkhorn Creek heard about the militiamen’s deaths in Massachusetts, they decided to name their outpost for the historic event. That is why what was then a part of Virginia is known today as Lexington, Kentucky.
    —
    On Saturday, April 22, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts convened for the first time since the outbreak of violence, meeting briefly at Concord before adjourning to Watertown so as to be closer to what was becoming the center of provincial activity in Cambridge. That afternoon the Congress formed a committee to take depositions “from which a full account of the transactions of the troops, under General Gage, in their route to and from Concord, on Wednesday the last, may be collected, to be sent to England, by the first ship from Salem.” General Gage was already preparing his own official account, which

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