Bunker Hill

Army. “The errors they have fallen into are natural and easily accounted for,” he explained to Samuel Adams. “A sudden alarm brought them together, animated with the noblest spirit. They left their houses, their families, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, without a day’s provision and many without a farthing in their pockets.” Much of the current problem lay with the fact that all of them—soldiers and civil office holders alike—were traveling in uncharted territory. “It is not easy for men, especially when interest and the gratification of appetite are considered, to know how far they may continue to tread in the path where there are no landmarks to direct them.” That said, a dangerous metamorphosis was occurring among the recruits in Cambridge and Roxbury. “It is with our countrymen as with all other men, when they are in arms, they think the military should be uppermost.” If something was not done quickly, “what was not good at first will be soon insupportable . . . as the infection is caught by every new corps that arrives. . . . For the honor of my country, I wish the disease may be cured before it is known to exist.”
    In a consummate irony, Joseph Warren entrusted the delivery of the letter communicating this desperate plea to Benjamin Church. But this was not another instance in which Warren proved remarkably obtuse as to Church’s true character. On the contrary, by sending Church to Philadelphia, Warren was getting someone who had proved to be both erratic and, on occasion, incompetent as far away from Cambridge as possible. “I am appointed to my vexation to carry the dispatches to Philadelphia,” Church complained in a dispatch to Gage on May 24, “and must set out tomorrow which will prevent my writing for some time unless an opportunity should be found thence by water.”
    As it turned out, Church did not return to New England until the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
    —
    Israel Putnam was the provincial army’s most beloved officer. Grizzled and battle-scarred as an old whale, he exuded an aura of rustic belligerence. While his superior General Ward wanted to do nothing that might endanger a possible reconciliation with Britain, Putnam was impatient for action. On May 13, he led two thousand men on what could only be taken as a brazen taunt when he and his soldiers marched across the Neck at Charlestown, up Bunker Hill, where according to Lieutenant Barker, watching from Boston, “they kept parading a long time” before they marched into the virtually abandoned village of Charlestown on the Boston side of the peninsula. Once at the waterfront, with the British man-of-war
Somerset
anchored less than a quarter mile away, the soldiers gave “the war-whoop” and, Barker wrote, “returned as they came.” Putnam’s boyish love of adventure had made for a strange and most unmilitary display. “It was expected the body of [soldiers] in Charlestown would have fired on the
Somerset
, at least it was wished for,” Barker mused, “as she had everything ready for action and must have destroyed great numbers of them, besides putting the town in ashes
.
”
    The march to Charlestown may have been foolish but was no doubt good for morale as the siege appeared to be settling into an unsatisfactory stalemate. With no clear military objective except for keeping the British bottled up in Boston, the men had little to do other than build earthen fortifications (known as “fatigue” duty) and serve as sentries. For the New Englanders watching from the hills of Roxbury and Cambridge, any activity on the part of the British, no matter how inconsequential, provided a welcome distraction from the growing tedium. On the night of May 17, fire erupted in Boston’s Dock Square when, it was reported, a spark from a candle fell among a pile of cartridges of gunpowder. The regulars refused to allow the town’s inhabitants to help put out the fire, and by 3:00 a.m. the barracks and an estimated thirty warehouses, at least some of which undoubtedly contained goods owned by patriot merchants, had burned to the ground.
    On Saturday, May 21, Gage ordered four sloops to sail to tiny Grape Island near the town of Weymouth to pick up some recently harvested hay. The appearance of this little British fleet along the shores of Braintree and Weymouth immediately created concern among the local inhabitants. Thinking this might be the prelude to a full-scale invasion, people living