Bunker Hill

history.
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    Almost lost in this furious rush of events was the arrival just three days before of a vessel from England bearing Josiah Quincy Jr. After his months in London observing the workings of the ministry and Parliament, combined with his many conversations with Benjamin Franklin and other Americans with a deep understanding of British policy, he felt he had information that was of immense importance to the future of Massachusetts. He must speak directly with either Samuel Adams or Joseph Warren.
    The passage had been long and miserable, made all the more agonizing by Quincy’s rapidly deteriorating health. By the time the vessel came within sight of land, Quincy knew he did not have long to live and expressed his last wishes to one of the ship’s sailors, who dutifully wrote a transcript of the young lawyer’s dying soliloquy. Quincy was convinced that what he had to tell Adams and Warren might have been of “great service to my country,” but he dared not commit his message to paper. We will never know what Quincy wanted to say. However, given the drastic changes that had occurred since Lexington and Concord, Quincy’s almost two-month-old insights were probably no longer relevant. In the end, Quincy, like virtually everyone who had attempted to improve relations between Great Britain and her rebellious colonies, was defeated by the sea.
    The following day, April 27, Joseph Warren wrote to their mutual friend Arthur Lee in London. “Our friend Quincy just lived to come on shore to die in his own country,” he wrote. “He expired yesterday morning. His virtues rendered him dear, and his abilities useful, to his country.” And that was it.
    Without a paragraph break, Warren launched into a description of New England at this critical juncture. “I think it probable,” he wrote, “that the rage of the people . . . will lead them to attack General Gage, and burn the ships in the harbor. . . . The next news from England must be conciliatory, or the connection between us ends, however fatal the consequences may be.”
    Despite the posturing that had so troubled Timothy Pickering on the day after Lexington and Concord, Warren still felt that a reconciliation was possible. “If anything is proposed that may be for the honor and safety of Great Britain and these colonies,” he wrote, “my utmost efforts shall not be wanting.” Warren ended this brief, hurriedly dashed-off expression of grief, resolve, anger, and hope—which appears to have been personally delivered to Lee by Captain Derby of the
Quero
—with a glimpse of himself amid the provincial army in Cambridge. He was, he wrote Lee, “in the utmost haste, surrounded by fifteen or twenty thousand men.”
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    Even before the outbreak of fighting, the provincial forces realized that the secret to ousting the British from Boston required something they did not have: a suitable number of cannons. They also realized that they needed officers with the artillery skills required to fire these cannons. Two Boston men fit the bill perfectly: Colonel Richard Gridley, sixty-five, a hero of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg, and Lieutenant Colonel William Burbeck, fifty-nine, who had been serving at the Castle for a number of years. Both officers had already worked extensively with the British army; in fact, Gridley was one of the handful of Americans with a commission in that army—a prize that not even George Washington had been able to win. To secure these two valuable officers, the Provincial Congress offered Gridley and Burbeck not only salaries but lifetime annuities. But if the provincial army now had two experienced artillery officers, it still did not have a sufficient number of cannons.
    On Sunday, April 29, a new arrival from New Haven, Connecticut, named Benedict Arnold told Joseph Warren and the Committee of Safety exactly what they wanted to hear. At the poorly defended British stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga at the southern end of Lake Champlain there were “80 pieces of heavy cannon, 20 brass and 4 18-pounders and 10–12 mortars.” In retrospect it was an almost eerie moment of historical synchronicity. The weekend after the spy Benjamin Church had met not-so-secretly with General Gage in Boston, the man destined to become the Revolution’s most notorious traitor was in Cambridge convincing Joseph Warren to finance his genuinely patriotic bid to take Fort Ticonderoga.
    In 1775, Captain Benedict Arnold was a long way from betraying