Bunker Hill

would soon be on its way to London. Massachusetts must prove that the British not only had fired the first shot but were now waging a most brutal and inhumane war against innocent New England citizens.
    Even though the next day was a Sunday, Congress convened at 7:00 a.m. With John Hancock about to head for Philadelphia, they needed a new president. That afternoon an election was held for a “president
pro tempore
,” and the committee appointed to count the ballots reported that “the vote was full for Doctor Warren.”
    That same day, even as Admiral Graves oversaw the construction of a battery of cannons amid the cemetery stones of Copp’s Hill in the North End, the fate of many of Boston’s still-remaining patriots was being decided at an emergency town meeting. Gage had offered the town’s inhabitants a proposal that had been approved by Warren and the Committee of Safety. If the Bostonians agreed to surrender their weapons, he would allow anyone who was so inclined to exit the city with whatever baggage they could take with them. It was humiliating to have to hand over their guns, but after a day-long town meeting in Faneuil Hall, they reluctantly agreed. In the days ahead a staggering 1,778 muskets, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses were collected and labeled for eventual return.
    Gage appears to have initially offered the proposal in good faith. With no more foodstuffs coming into Boston from the country, the fewer mouths to feed the better. The loyalists in the city, however, saw it differently. They were convinced that the presence of a sizable number of patriots in Boston had prevented their rebellious brethren from mounting an attack. They needed what were in effect hostages to ensure that the ever-increasing hordes in Roxbury and Cambridge did not come rampaging across the Neck and kill them all. Bowing to the loyalists’ demands, Gage ultimately refused to honor the agreement he had made with the town’s inhabitants, one of the few instances during his tenure in Boston when he did not keep his word.
    Eventually Gage settled on a kind of compromise. A limited number of people were allowed to leave as long as they did not take any of their possessions with them. Those who were prepared to depart at all costs, such as John Andrews’s wife, Ruthy (who was as incapacitated by fear as Sarah Deming had been), eventually left the city. Her husband, however, decided to stay. If he left, there would be no one to watch over their home and personal effects, and he was, at least for now, unwilling to lose everything. Reverend Andrew Eliot was the minister of the New North Meeting; his wife and children and most of his congregation had already left the city, as had almost every other Congregational minister, but he resolved to stay. Someone, he decided, needed to look after the spiritual life of those few remaining residents. “I have been prevailed with to officiate to those who are still left to tarry,” he explained, “but my situation is uncomfortable to the last degree—friends perpetually coming to bid me adieu, much the greater parts of the inhabitants gone out of town—the rest following as fast as the general will give leave.” Patriots and loyalists alike found it both sad and terrifying to watch as the city was, in the words of Peter Oliver, “reduced to a perfect skeleton.”
    Over the course of the next few months more than nine thousand people left Boston as the provincial army that surrounded the city grew to the point that it came close to approaching Boston’s former population of fifteen thousand. A city had been turned inside out: flushed of its inhabitants and artificially stuffed, as if by a taxidermist, with a British army that, as military transports continued to arrive in Boston Harbor, eventually approached nine thousand men.
    With the economic life of the city having come to a standstill, Boston quickly became a ragged ghost of what it had once been. “Grass growing in the public walks and streets of this once populous and flourishing place,” the Reverend Andrew Eliot wrote, “shops and warehouses shut up. Business at an end and everyone in anxiety and distress. The provincial army at our doors. The [British] troops absolutely confined in this town which is almost an island and surrounded with ships which [are] its greatest security. . . . These things . . . keep us in perpetual alarm and make this a very unquiet habitation. I cannot stand it