Bunker Hill

matters into its own hands.
    By all accounts, the soldiers were eating well—feasting on what food and alcohol they could pillage from the abandoned homes of the loyalists and the stream of provisions that flowed in from the country. Hygiene, however, was a problem. The dormitory at Harvard and other buildings in Cambridge and Roxbury had been turned into barracks, and one loyalist claimed that the soldiers were not only dirty but “lousy.” There were not enough latrines, and the growing number of recruits who died of typhus, or “putrid fever” (as many as two or three a day by early June), suggests that as spring turned to summer, a most unpleasant smell had arisen in Cambridge and Roxbury.
    That these primarily young men from the country were not accustomed to taking orders from anyone made the enforcement of discipline difficult. Not only did the members of a typical company all know each other (indeed, many were related by blood), they were accustomed to making decisions by consensus at town meetings. This meant that the soldiers, not their officers, decided any issues that might have a direct impact on their welfare. On May 10, Private James Stevens complained in his diary that Captain Thomas Poor “spoke very rash concerning our choosing a sergeant and said that we had no right.” Taking umbrage, the soldiers decided to “do no duty that day.” Captain Poor had no choice but to apologize to his men, and after his “recantation,” Stevens and the others returned to duty. This army was a dangerous thing—a budding democracy of young men with firearms.
    Inevitably adding to the surliness of the recruits was the availability of large quantities of rum. Muskets kept going off—sometimes accidentally, sometimes for the fun of it, injuring and, in at least one instance, killing American soldiers. “Four guns were discharged in camp and endangered men’s lives,” David Avery recorded in his diary on May 8. “One out of our window, one at the picket guard. Two others hurt. An awful day!” The New Englanders could be raucous, but they also tended to be exceedingly religious, attending prayers on an almost daily basis and listening to one, sometimes two sermons each Sunday. The diary kept by Private Amos Farnsworth is as much a record of his spiritual life as it is an account of his experiences in the provincial army. “I was filled with love to God. . . . ,” he wrote at one point, “and lifted up my soul to God in ejaculation, prayers, and praise.” These men were fighting for liberty, but they also believed that the Lord was, in his own inscrutable way, working through each and every one of them.
    Spiritual, ornery, and clannish, the New Englanders defined their struggle in profoundly local terms. They refused to serve under an officer they did not know or like. They also seemed intent on having a good time. Ezekiel Price of Stoughton visited Roxbury in early June and found the soldiers “in high spirits and healthy; being mostly young men and many of them persons of wealth and reputable yeomen.” That was not the impression of a surgeon from a man-of-war who had been given permission to cross the provincial lines to attend to wounded British prisoners. He found the streets of Cambridge “crowded with carts and carriages, bringing them rum, cider, etc., from the neighboring towns, for without New England rum, a New England army could not be kept together. . . . They drink at least a bottle of it a man a day.” The surgeon had his obvious biases, but there was more than a little truth in his description of an army that was barely under anyone’s control: “nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness; and must fall to pieces of itself in the course of three months. They are . . . the descendants of Oliver Cromwell’s army, who truly inherit the spirit which was the occasion of so much bloodshed in [England].”
    When the Provincial Congress and Committee of Safety proved slow in providing commissions not only for General Ward’s officers but for Ward himself, there was much grumbling within the army about the inefficiency of what passed for civil government in Massachusetts. One of Gage’s spies reported that he heard the provincial soldiers “complaining much of the private men having the superiority over the officers, rather than the officers over the men. I plainly saw there was no kind of