The story really begins yesterday, on June 17th, 1775.
But my real grasp of it began nearly 200 years later, on an early March day, while I was in high school. My mom was having a big party as a fund raiser for the hospital where my dad worked. We had a large, mostly unused room on one end of the house and it had been decorated and tables set up and all that. And we needed to get the fire going in the fireplace. My uncle Bill (everybody in the extended family seemed to be involved doing something) was responsible for fires, and the house had a bunch of fireplaces. So we needed a lot of kindling. Bill looked at me and said: “Let’s go.”
So, off we went. The kindling was at his house, less than 2 miles away. We took a detour… about a 2 hour detour. We ended up on Dorchester Heights, and Bill pointed out where the gun emplacements had been; as an old artilleryman, he knew the exact spot of each battery.
So, back to June 17th, 1775. Actually, a few days before that the “Committee on Safety” had received word that the British were going to occupy Charlestown. To those familiar with Boston today, Charlestown (and Boston) looks nothing like it did then, as a result of a great deal of landfill in the intervening years. At the time it was almost an island, connected by a narrow neck of land. Charlestown itself was shaped somewhat like a triangle, and two hills dominated it, Breed’s Hill in the center, and Bunker Hill a bit to the west, just east of the narrow neck that led to Charlestown.
General Israel Putnam was ordered to prepare to defend against the British attack. Putnam set up the defenses on Bunker and Breed’s Hills. Colonel William Prescott’s regiment was the main force on the hills, and to make a long story short, despite the relative lack of experience of the “rebels” (the Americans) and the experience of the British, the fight that followed was hard-fought and bloody. Three times the Briths attacked and the third attack carried the day, but the Rebels withdrew in fairly good order and made it over the neck and back into Boston.
One of the disconcerting issues for the attacking British is that the “Rebels” held their fire until the British were fairly close; this is where the – probably apocryphal – order was given. reportedly by Putnam: “Don’t fire until you can see the white’s of their eyes.”
Though probably a myth, the American’s held fire until the British were very close and there was a very high number of casualties for an engagement of this size.
British losses were quite high, with more than 1,000 killed and wounded out of a force of 3,000. This included more than 80 officers. The Rebels, who were outnumbered (there were only 2,400) suffered some 450 killed and wounded, and most of them escaped. A recent review of diaries and letters from both the rebels on the hill and the British Army troopers trying to get top the hill has allowed a fairly detailed count of how much ammunition those pesky farmers had, and how many wounds were suffered by the British.
The material suggests that more than 1% of the rounds fired actually hit home, a success rate that has been matched or bettered by only a handful of batters in history. The British Army won, but they had been badly blooded, had developed a very healthy respect for the “embattled farmers,” and the rag-tag rebels had managed to withdraw in fairly good order.
Evidence of the concern, shortly after the after action report came out, and General Gage, the British “tactical commander,” was relieved.
An uneasy standoff now developed, but, still, the British held Boston.
On July 2nd a new commander arrived, George Washington, with the goal of forcing the British out of Boston. This wouldn’t be easy, as the Royal Navy had obvious control of the sea, and the Americans had no means to strike the British positions in Boston. All they could do was hold the perimeter and try to counter a British attack if it occurred. Washington wanted to attack, but there were no plans that any of his staff could develop that looked like it would succeed.
And there was one problem, a problem Washington noted as soon as he had arrived: the Americans had no cannons.
Until Henry Knox came up with an idea (it’s not crystal clear in the records that Knox came up with the idea, some suggest Benedict Arnold. But Washington gave it to Knox to execute the plan, so it would seem to be a good bet that it was Knox’s idea.)
Knox was a local Bostonian who owned a book store; he was a large, friendly man, very well read, particularly in military science, engineering and history, he was wicked smart and he had the heart of lion; he was 25 years old.
At the south end of Lake Champlain lay Ft. Ticonderoga, overlooking the Narrows that, just a few miles further north, open up into the Lake itself. In May of 1775 the fort had been taken by Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, and this included more than 60 cannons.
Knox plan was simple stated: take the cannons from Ft Ticonderoga and bring them to Boston. On November 15th, 1775, Knox left Washington’s camp in Cambridge with orders to bring the cannons to Boston.
By December 10th they had arrived at FT Ticonderoga, surveyed the cannons, picked 59 that they wished to move and had moved them the three miles to the northern tip of Lake George. The plan was to move them by boat the length of the lake, then put them on sleds and move the cannon south to Glen Falls, then roughly follow the Hudson River to just south of Albany. Then they would follow the roads that, over the next two centuries, evolved into the Massachusetts Turnpike (Interstate 90). It involved 42 large sleds (sleds rather than wagons as it was winter), covering a distance of 300 miles.
The move down Lake George started out well, then the temperature dropped and they finished the 2nd day on the lake – and reached Ft George at the south end. Then they hacked their way through new ice on the lake.
Heading further south they had to cross and recross the Hudson River four times. In early January they still had one more crossing of the Hudson to acieve. In the effort, the ice broke and they lost one cannon. After getting all the sleds across, they went back to the river, back into the river, and recovered the cannon.
Further progress was slowed by, at first, a lack of snow, making the pulling of sleds hard work for the oxen. In the case of moving downhill onto hills and mountains of western Massachusetts, the difficulty in controlling the sleds was a challenge, since they tended to move faster than the oxen pulling them.
But they reached Cambridge on January 25th – with all 59 cannons.
Now, what to do?
If you look at a map of Boston today, look at South Boston and find West 2nd Street. That would be the beach at low tide, and the shore turned at the south-east end of the road where it runs into Emerson. Then it arced up a little to the north as it headed east, all the way out to Farragut Road. Behind that lien rose Dorchester Heights; north and east of that line was Boston Harbor (all the other land was filled in after 1880).
At this point Washington had riflemen moving about on Dorchester Heights, but he was aware that if the British saw the Americans starting to build fortifications and firing positions on the Heights, they would attack and there was little he could do to stop them. He needed to get the guns in position, behind real barricades, and he needed to give the British no time to react.
At this point Rufus Putnam of Braintree came on the scene. He was a 38-year-old cousin of Washington’s general, Israel Putnam and had served as an engineer with the British army during the French and Indian War and had a little experience building fortifications. Washington asked Putnam to offer a solution. Putnam, at a bit of a loss for ideas, asked General William Heath of Roxbury – who had given Putnam’s instruction to name it Washington – if he had any answers. What Heath had was a book: “Attack and Defense of Fortified Places.”
After begging Heath to let him borrow the book, Putnam started reading and developed the answer: What are known as “chandeliers,” a wooden barricade designed to sit on hard ground. Washington took note; what followed was, as the British later said, nearly magical. The Americans built a series of chandeliers, and a host of other parts to make not only a series of barricaded barriers, but also ways to mask the movement of the guns to the heights, to include moving hundreds of huge bales of hay into positions where they could be used to block the British line of sight as they arrayed the cannons.
Washington picked March 4th to begin the operation, knowing that if the British were to attack when they discovered the American effort, the attack would take place on March 5th, the 6th anniversary of the Boston Massacre.
On March 4th, as night fell (sunset was 5:35), hundreds of bales of hay were moved along the side of the road from Roxbury into Boston, obstructing the British view of the road from Boston, and then they began to move the chandeliers, and barrels full of of gravel and cannons and all the other parts to the fortifications. It was 350 carts in all, with 3,000 soldiers acting as laborers, plus two battalions riflemen of 400 men each for security – all headed to Dorchester Heights. By 10PM, two forts had been set up.
British sentries in Boston noted “work on Dorchester Heights,” but no action was taken.
The next morning the British woke to find the two forts on Dorchester Heights. As one officer noted: “They were all raised during the night with an expedition equal to that of the Genii belonging to Aladdin’s wonderful lamp.”
In fact, the Americans had inadequate amounts of gunpowder or shot and shell. But what began the fight was regular shelling at relatively low rates of fire. The first day was of little note. The second day caused some damage and some casualties. The British high command met, and on the 7th decided that an attack up the heights, as with Bunker Hill, but this time facing cannon as well as the American riflemen, would be catastrophic. On the 8th they sent over a request to Washington under a white flag: they would depart and not burn the city if the Americans would let them evacuate.
And so, on Sunday, March 17th, 1776, at 9AM, the last British troops left Boston.
And that is why March 17th in Boston is known as Evacuation Day as well as St. Patrick’s Day.
And we still got home in time to start the fires.
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