Bunker Hill

his country. A successful and self-made merchant captain with a specialty in trading horses, he had forced the New Haven selectmen, at virtual gunpoint, to provide his “Governor’s Footguards” with the powder and weapons they needed from the town’s arsenal and then marched his men to Cambridge. At thirty-four, he was almost exactly Warren’s age; he was bright, charismatic, and ambitious, and the two men seem to have struck up an almost instant friendship. Within a few days Warren had ordered Arnold to mount an attack on Fort Ticonderoga.
    Unknown to both Warren and Arnold, another group from Connecticut was at that very moment enlisting the aid of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys to do exactly the same thing, thus making the Massachusetts effort instantly redundant. There was also the question of jurisdiction. What gave Massachusetts—or Connecticut, for that matter—the right to attack a fort outside their colony, let alone confiscate the cannons from that fort? But the most serious strike against this misguided mission into the New York wilderness had to do with what was already a well-known deficiency in Massachusetts. More than anything else—more than cannons and mortars—the province needed gunpowder. On May 1, as Warren considered Arnold’s proposal, he wrote Committee of Supplies member Elbridge Gerry on this very issue. Without more powder, they might very well “trifle away this only moment we have to employ for the salvation of our country.” Even knowing this, Warren equipped Arnold with two hundred pounds of this valuable substance for his mission to Fort Ticonderoga.
    As it turned out, Arnold had no use for the gunpowder. Soon after learning of the rival expedition, he raced toward Lake Champlain and presented Ethan Allen with his orders from the Committee of Safety of Massachusetts. Since Allen had no official orders of his own, he reluctantly agreed to allow Arnold to serve with him as a coleader, and unopposed, the two men strode side by side through the entrance of the British fort.
    The two hundred pounds of Massachusetts gunpowder proved unnecessary at Fort Ticonderoga but might have changed the course of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Instead of an example of farsighted strategic planning, the decision to send Benedict Arnold to the Champlain Valley was the mistake that may have cost Joseph Warren his life.
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    By the first week of May, Warren had learned that Connecticut was sending a delegation to talk to General Gage about the possibility of “a cessation of hostilities.” Warren had been able to marginalize Timothy Pickering and the other equivocators among the provincial officer corps, but a rival colony from New England was something else altogether. If Connecticut should break ranks and negotiate its own separate agreement with the British, it would mean the end to a New England–wide army. Unlike Massachusetts, Connecticut had in Jonathan Trumbull a governor elected by the people of his colony rather than appointed by the king, making Connecticut’s potential defection all the more damaging. If a reconciliation was to happen, it had to be initiated not by the Americans but by the British. Until then, they must all agree to prepare for war. “We fear our brethren in Connecticut are not even yet convinced of the cruel designs of Administration against America . . . ,” Warren wrote Trumbull. “We have lost the town, and we greatly fear, the inhabitants of Boston, as we find the general is perpetually making new conditions, and forming the most unreasonable pretenses for retarding their removal from the garrison. . . . Our people have been barbarously murdered by an insidious enemy, who under cover of the night, have marched into the heart of the country, spreading destruction with fire and sword. No business but that of war is either done or thought of in this colony.”
    The Connecticut delegation met with Gage, who was quite persuasive in pointing out that with thousands of militiamen surrounding Boston, the British, not the provincials, were the ones on the defensive. In the end, however, Gage’s decision to renege on his original agreement with the townspeople of Boston was what brought Connecticut over to Massachusetts’s way of thinking. Having misled the poor beleaguered people of Boston, Gage was, a Connecticut officer in Cambridge wrote, “wicked, infamous, and base without parallel.” Governor Trumbull ultimately decided that he must stand by