The First American Army Read online

  Howe ordered his men to march slowly in the direction of the newly dug breastworks on Breed’s Hill. He sent the Royal Welch Fusiliers on a trot across a beach near the rear of the hill, toward a low stone wall and wood fence below the breastworks that seemed lightly defended because there was no firing coming from it.

  Howe and his officers did not realize that Colonel John Stark and others had instructed their men behind the wall to withhold their fire until the Redcoats were close enough to hit with some accuracy. They were also instructed to shoot the officers to cause confusion and prevent orders from being heard.

  When the intimidating Fusiliers, four abreast, bayonets fixed, trotted within fifty yards of the wall, the Americans opened up. The sound of the volley—it seemed that every musket was fired at once—could be heard throughout Boston.

  The fury and force of the gunfire stunned the British. Stark had been right. At that close distance the muskets were lethal. Officers were hit and went down. The first line of men, instead of continuing up the slope toward the Americans, halted and tried to exchange fire with their muskets; this caused the second line to walk right into them. They were all easy targets for the Americans. Some of the British soldiers pitched forward, dead, and the men next to them fell backwards, musket balls lodged in their heads and chests, blood spurting everywhere. Those behind and around them were hit and killed or wounded and went down. Screams filled the air. Howe’s vision of one single charge to drive the Americans off the hill and back to Charlestown evaporated in a roar of muskets, the air filled with the flames of the guns discharging and a rising cloud of smoke. Howe’s own trousers were splattered with the blood of his men.

  On the southern side of the hill, a similar outcome occurred as the Americans unleashed a thunderous musket volley that cut into the British army approaching the earthworks and the redoubt, a wooden wall that protected them. The British were decimated. Their regulars were not only easy targets, but Howe had so many of them, 1,550, and they were positioned so close together that musket balls missing one soldier hit the man next to him or behind him.

  The British were also advancing through grass that hid large rocks and deep holes. Soldiers tripped on the impediments and fell, sometimes bringing down those near them. Others tripped over their bodies as they tumbled. Their formations came apart in minutes and their legendary ability to maneuver on the battlefield was thwarted. As they tried to stand or help each other, they were hit with yet another volley of fire from the provincials behind the breastworks on top of Breed’s Hill. Orders shouted by the English army officers were drowned out by the screaming of the wounded lying in the grass, the triumphant shouts of the rebels, and the sounds of the muskets. Blood flew everywhere in the hot afternoon air, and the British, shaken, retreated back down the hill.

  The Americans had held. The enlisted men, especially, felt satisfaction in repulsing the first charge of the British up the slope with, as a spectator said with some pride, “a hot fire.”3 First Lieutenant Samuel Webb, fighting on Breed’s, wrote that “cannon and musket balls were flying about our ears like hail” but that the Americans did not flinch and that, in fact, “our men were in fine spirits.” Captain Samuel Ward, too, was proud of himself and his men, writing that he had been “where the bullets had flew several times without showing many marks of fear.”4

  Robert Steele, a drummer boy, wrote after that assault that “the conflict was sharp, but the British soon retreated with a quicker step than they came up, leaving some of their killed and wounded in sight of us . . . came up again and a second battle ensued which was harder and longer than the first. [There] was great noise and confusion.”5

  That was Howe’s second assault, that he ordered with newly arrived Sir Henry Clinton, another general, at his side. The general had underestimated the Americans but he was certain that a second charge would succeed. It did not. His second attack only resulted in more dead and wounded British soldiers. A third charge was ordered late in the afternoon.

  The third thrust up the hill was similar to the first two, but this time the British, with the right ammunition, used cannon that helped to soften American defenses. Again, the British were raked with a loud volley of musket fire followed by more throaty cheers from the Americans despite cannonballs exploding around them. Again, the English went down like red-colored dominos. On this occasion, earlier faulty planning caused the Americans to run out of ammunition and they could not continue to defend the hill. The Americans did not run out of powder slowly, but abruptly, moving a British officer to write with surprise that the provincial’s fire “went out like an old candle.”6

  The British, with no resistance from the Americans, climbed to within the shadows of the redoubt, earthworks, and fences. The English, angry, were now the ones screaming in triumph. Colonel Prescott decided to abandon the fort to save his men from what he knew would be a massacre. He wrote, “The enemy, being numerous, surrounded our little fort, began to mount our lines and enter the fort with their bayonets.”7

  Out of gunpowder, the Americans fled amidst gritty hand to hand combat. Putnam unsuccessfully tried to direct them up to Bunker Hill, where others had waited. Then they also fled. Private Brown had stayed on Breed’s until the last moment, and then departed. He wrote later, “I jumped over the walls and ran for about half a mile where the balls flew like hailstones and cannons roared like thunder.”8

  Those who viewed the action said the retreat was orderly and saw it as a great moral victory for the Americans, who had fought courageously all afternoon. The enlisted men firing away at the Redcoats that day believed that in killing 226 enemy soldiers and wounding another 828, nearly half the attacking troops, with far fewer losses of their own—140 dead, including Dr. Warren, whom the British contended was the head rabble-rouser in Massachusetts, and 301 wounded. They had showed both the country and the Crown that they were a resilient foe. “We . . . sustained the enemy’s attacks with great bravery and resolution,” wrote Amos Farnsworth, a corporal at Breed’s, “and after bearing for about two hours as severe and heavy a fire as perhaps ever was known . . . we were overpowered by numbers and obliged to leave the entrenchment.”9

  And without enough gunpowder there was little more to be accomplished that terrible day. “Had our troops been furnished with a sufficient supply of ammunition, the enemy must have suffered a total defeat,” wrote Thacher, who added that the battle built the confidence of the American troops and showed one and all that “we are favored with the smiles of heaven.”10

  The British agreed. One British lieutenant said that “the oldest officers say they never saw sharper action” and General John Burgoyne, watching the action from Boston, scoffed at the suggestion of a cowardly pullback. He noted that “the retreat was no flight; it was covered even with bravery and military skill.” General Henry Clinton, who would be in America for six years, was glad to take the hills and get back to Boston without worse losses. He called it “a dear bought victory” and added that “another such would have ruined us.”11

  One of those at Bunker Hill that day was young John Greenwood, fifteen, a fifer who had returned to town to rejoin his family, whom he had not seen in two years. The Greenwoods were still in Boston, prevented from leaving by the British. Unable to see them, Greenwood had joined the army a few weeks before as a musician for the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment. Captain T. T. Bliss had given him a pass to visit his aunt fifteen miles outside of Boston two days previously but, halfway there, his fife stuck in his pocket and sword dangling from his waist, the teenaged fifer had a premonition that something was going to happen in Boston. He alternately walked and ran back to the camp, sleeping at a farmhouse on the way.

  “At dawn I heard the firing of great guns,” he wrote in his memoirs of June 17, “which caused me to quicken my pace. I thought it was my duty to be there.”

  The fifer arrived at Cambridge Common, a mile from Breed’s and Bunker Hill, amid unbridled chaos. “Everywhere the greatest terror and confusion seemed to
prevail,” he wrote. Greenwood headed through the scattered crowds of frantic, shouting residents, some on foot, some in carriages, and some reigning in their horses, and all of the wounded soldiers stumbling toward the common. Greenwood ran toward the slope of Breed’s Hill while the battle was still in progress. He passed an African American soldier who had been badly wounded. “His collar being open and he not having anything on except his shirt and trousers, I saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back,” Greenwood wrote.

  Greenwood asked the soldier if his wound hurt, and the man said that it did not and that once he had a bandage wrapped around his neck to stem the bleeding he would go back to the battle. The teenager had been frightened, but now a remarkable calm came over him. He wrote, “I began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment, and fear never troubled me afterward during the whole war.”

  Greenwood left the wounded man and hurried toward Breed’s Hill, looking for his regiment. In the tumult of the morning, he ran directly into his mother, who had been racing around the commons looking for him. His mother, who left Boston with a pass, begged him to return to his uncle’s home on Cape Cod. “Don’t go there,” she said, looking toward Bunker and Breed’s Hills. “You’ll be killed!” Her son told her that he had to find his regiment and left.

  Halfway to Breed’s, he located the regiment, stationed on a road with two cannon. Captain Bliss, his commander, was surprised that the boy had returned. Greenwood explained that he had raced toward the action when he heard the sound of the guns in the early morning. The officer smiled down at him.

  “I was much caressed by my captain and my company, who regarded me as a brave little fellow,” wrote the teenager, whose morning amid the carnage at Bunker Hill began his long and dangerous journey as a soldier in the first American army.

  Chapter Two

  THE SIEGE OF BOSTON, 1775–1776:

  Private Greenwood Joins an Armed Camp

  Private John Greenwood, one of the youngest enlisted men in the Continental Army, heard his first fife and saw his first British soldier at the same time. Like many Bostonians, he watched the arrival of two regiments of immaculately uniformed British regulars, the Fourteenth West Yorks and the Twenty-Ninth Worcesters. They came in their red coats and bright brass buttons at the city’s Long Wharf on October 1, 1768, following a London decision to place troops there after the civil unrest of the previous few years.

  The British regiments left their ship and assembled smartly on the wide, lengthy wooden pier with its long row of shops and warehouses and marched through town on the main thoroughfare, King Street, to the grassy field that served as the Boston commons. They were led by their regimental fife and drum band, which played martial music to impress the large crowd of colonial onlookers that had gathered to watch them parade to the commons.

  The Bostonians, angry at their arrival, glowered at them as they walked by. In the groups of people scattered along the route to the commons stood young Greenwood, then just eight years old, who was fascinated by the men playing the high notes on the fife. He moved from block to block, following them along King and past Cornhill Street, winding his way between people or jumping up and down to see the band as it marched by.

  Shortly afterwards, Greenwood obtained an old, rather tarnished fife. The long, slender instrument had a crack in it which he sealed with putty. He watched and listened to the British fifers on parade in Boston whenever he could and taught himself to play just by observing them. He became good enough to be taken in as a volunteer fifer with a local militia company. He was fifteen. While many of the men in the militia went through their routines monotonously, some there perhaps only for the beer that was served at the end of the day, the young fifer delighted in playing the tunes he had learned in music books he had purchased. The men enjoyed his music and nodded approvingly at him as he played while they drilled. The boy’s love of fife music continued over the next few years, but his esteem for the British soldiers did not.

  Samuel Maverick was a teenager who worked as an apprentice for Greenwood’s father, a local dentist in Boston. The dentist paid Maverick small wages for his work in the dental office, but gave him meals and allowed him to live in his home, where he shared a bedroom with his son John. The two teenagers became fast friends. In 1770, Maverick, who loved to discuss politics, dined at the home of some teenaged friends, the Carys, and then went out. He and John’s older brother Isaac approached troops gathered on King Street near the Customs House shortly after 9 p.m. but were separated. Maverick worked his way toward the front of the crowd that was harassing British soldiers. Residents shouted at the troops, some screaming “kill them!”

  At the height of the dispute, when the frightened soldiers raised their muskets to threaten the crowd, Maverick shouted, “Fire away, you damned lobsterbacks!” They did. The musket fire killed Maverick and four others and sent fifteen-year-old John Greenwood spiraling into a deep depression over the loss of his close friend in what was quickly called the Boston Massacre by the press.1 He not only grieved publicly, but was tormented in private. “After his death, I used to go to bed in the dark on purpose to see his spirit, for I was so fond of him and he of me,” Greenwood wrote in his journal.

  His father, who also experimented with early electrical inventions, was the son of a Harvard professor. He enrolled Greenwood in the city’s prestigious North School, where he earned good grades. He was not in school for long, however, because his uncle asked his father to send John to live with him in Falmouth, a fishing community on the southwestern tip of Cape Cod. His uncle, a wealthy man, had recently become a widower and had no children. He needed someone to help him around the house and to run errands for his business. He also yearned for company.

  The teenager arrived in Falmouth in the spring of 1773, a few months before the Boston Tea Party. He wrote, “The whole country at this time was in commotion and nothing was talked of but war, liberty, or death; persons of all descriptions were embodying themselves into military companies and every old drunken fellow they found who had been a soldier was employed evenings to drill them.”

  Greenwood’s uncle moved into one of the largest homes in Falmouth, a three-story wooden house on the south side of Middle Street, shortly after his nephew arrived. His uncle, who had grown to despise the Crown, became the lieutenant of a local Cape Cod militia company and brought his nephew along as the troupe’s fifer. The boy joked that he was selected as the fifer because he was brave, healthy, and imbued with the military spirit. He added slyly that he was the only man or boy in Falmouth who knew how to play the fife.

  Two years later, the men in the company, and everyone else on Cape Cod, learned of the battles at Lexington and Concord. Greenwood had not been home to Boston to see his family in two years. He wanted to return because he feared a war and was worried about the safety of his parents. “I was afraid [my parents] would all be killed by the British, for nothing was talked of but murder and war,” he wrote in his journal.

  His uncle was opposed to the idea, but Greenwood sneaked away early on a Sunday morning, his sword dangling from his belt. Greenwood walked one hundred miles from Falmouth to Boston, a journey of five days. Signs of war were everywhere. He followed the main highway, a narrow dirt road, that led from Falmouth northwest to Boston. It took him through small villages and past the fields of large farms toward the port city, occupied by approximately five thousand British troops. He recalled, “As I traveled through the different towns, the people were preparing to march toward Boston to fight.”

  Passersby marveled that such a young boy was walking all the way to the port where the Americans had the British trapped. One night on the road, he found himself in a crowded roadside tavern, playing tunes on his fife for the patrons. They sang along and toasted him with tankards of grog following numerous cheers for the men in the militia units that had surrounded the British. Waitresses moved quickly between the thick wooden benches where some sat to the square wooden tables with their brig
htly lit candles, the men banging their tankards on the tabletops as they belted out their time-honored choruses. Seamen sang songs of their voyages and others sang about men and their women. The crowd finally got around to inquiring about the young fifer who was serenading them with whatever type of music they requested. The room was becoming more and more heated as the men loudly lambasted the king and the Redcoats holed up on the Boston peninsula. And so was young Greenwood, who had explained earlier that he was headed to Boston to visit his parents.

  “Why are you really going to Boston?” shouted one man. Greenwood, as aroused for war as the rest of them by that time late in the evening, put down his fife and yelled back, “To fight for my country.”

  All in the tavern roared their approval.

  When he reached Boston, a bustling city of seventeen thousand residents, he discovered that his former hometown had become an armed camp. British soldiers occupied the city itself and the rebel army surrounded them, with headquarters in Cambridge. He was told he could not visit his parents, still living in Boston. Greenwood had landed in the middle of a nightmarish scene. General Gage had given approval for people to flee Boston, but there was no organization to the flight of the refugees. Some left by land, to the south, with their belongings packed in bags slung over their shoulders or stacked up in wooden carts. Others took the ferry to Charlestown that glided silently through the harbor.

  The ferries were jammed with people and their possessions; the boats constantly threatened to tip over from the excess weight. Refugees included individual men and women, couples and families, some with animals, all carrying large trunks or tightly cinched canvas bags. There were so many people fleeing the port city—nearly half the population— that the overloaded ferries had to make runs all night, with their crowds of riders disembarking on docks shrouded in fog and darkness on the other side. No one knew where they would go next or when they could return to their homes. There were no plans to house them nearby.