Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (5 page)

The generals were astounded to find the army bottled up in a cul de sac. They had been sent from London to evaluate the tense situation in the colonies before word of the uprising had arrived there. As they surveyed the scene, they saw that the heights to the north and south had to be fortified if the troops were to break out and rout the rebels. In mid-June General Gage, still in overall command, prepared to occupy the Charlestown peninsula. He would use it as a base to move against the rebel camp at Cambridge. Later he would turn his attention to Dorchester, mop up resistance at Roxbury, and finish putting down the rebellion.

Before the attack could get underway, the rebels, led by General Putnam, rushed from Cambridge to occupy Bunker and Breed’s Hill themselves. A large, cool-headed northern Massachusetts farmer, Colonel William Prescott, helped Putnam solidify the gains. Through the night, their men dug trenches and erected a redoubt on Breed’s Hill. In the morning, they stared defiantly from behind their breastworks.

General Gage could not allow this affront to stand. The next day, a hot Saturday, June 17, guns in Boston and on the warships in the harbor began to heave cannonballs and exploding bombs at the rebel’s hastily constructed fortifications. That afternoon, General Howe and three thousand redcoats crossed from Boston to the peninsula, where they prepared to brush aside their opponents and occupy the heights.

Confusion reigned among the Americans. The chain of command was unclear; units marched in the wrong direction; desperately needed supplies and reinforcements went astray. Dressed in his shirtsleeves, the energetic Putnam, known as “Old Put,” rode frantically here and there, trying to organize the men who milled idly on Bunker Hill, well behind the American line.

John Stark arrived with five hundred of his men at the narrow neck that separated the Charlestown peninsula from the mainland. He found the air alive with fire from British floating batteries. Stark strolled calmly
forward into the killing zone, ordering his men to follow. Captain Henry Dearborn, marching into his first battle, urged him to hurry. Stark, “with a look peculiar to himself,” observed that “one fresh man in action is worth ten fatigued ones.”
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They proceeded across at a deliberate pace. When he reached the battlefield, Stark suspected that Howe would try to force his way past the rail fence on the American left. Although manned by rebel musketmen, the fence did not quite reach to the edge of the Mystic River. He ordered his men to reinforce the end of the fence line and to build a protective stone wall on the beach. He set a stake in the mud forty yards in front of their position to mark the spot where his men would first fire on the advancing British.

There was a brief hesitation before the fight began in earnest, a moment of “supremely agonizing suspense.” Unaccustomed to combat, the Americans felt their bowels churn and icy sweat flash across their skin. The scene “seemed unreal.”
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At three-thirty on a sweltering afternoon, the first pitched battle of the Revolutionary War began. Grenadiers and scarlet-clad British infantrymen marched forward in lines, moving step by step toward the tense patriots. “They looked too handsome to be fired at,” a militiaman said, “but we had to do it.”

As Stark suspected, a key part of General Howe’s attack was to sweep along the beach with a column of his best fighters, break into the Americans’ rear, and circumvent their efforts at fortification. Spotting the low stone barricade, he did not hesitate to send his light infantrymen charging ahead with steel bayonets thrust forward.

When the redcoats reached the stake on the beach, spectators crowding rooftops in Boston could hear clearly the ripping volley that Stark’s men let loose. The approaching infantry men fell to their knees and pitched into the muddy sand, torn by musket balls. The disciplined soldiers were staggered. They hesitated, then kept coming. More volleys, more men dropped.

Remembering tactics from his ranger days, Stark had arrayed two lines of musketmen behind the first. He ordered each line to shoot in succession while the others reloaded, so that attackers had to advance into almost continuous fire. He told them to load their muskets with “buck and ball,” a bullet and four bits of shot, for more killing power.

The slaughter stopped the attack along the beach and saved the American line from envelopment. All along that line now, a ferocious fight was under way. The British troops attacked and were driven back. “They advanced toward us in order to swallow us up,” one patriot remembered, “but they found a choaky mouthful of us.”
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The sulfurous air and dripping sweat stung men’s eyes. Soldiers on both sides frantically reloaded. Howe, a courageous battle leader, had underestimated the rebels’ determination. He regrouped and attacked again. Again his men were repulsed. Then he angled the focus of their charge toward the redoubt. The Americans ran low on ammunition. The British finally broke into the fort and drove the defenders back. Stark’s men were among the last to leave the field, fighting to keep the retreat from turning to a rout. Even General Burgoyne conceded that their withdrawal was “no flight, it was even covered with bravery and military skill.”

The rebels had killed 282 British soldiers and wounded 800. “A dear bought victory,” British general Henry Clinton would declare, “another would have ruined us.” When news of the costly battle reached London, the ministers immediately relieved Thomas Gage of his duties. General William Howe was made commander and handed the thorny task of finding a solution to the American rebellion.

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Three days before the carnage on Charlestown peninsula, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the collection of New England militiamen and transform them into a national army. They turned to one of their own to lead the effort, a delegate who had sufficient knowledge of the military art, the only one of them who had attended the proceedings wearing a uniform: George Washington. The tall Virginian combined a radical devotion to the cause with the ingrained forbearance of a man of property.

Appointed to the job, Washington immediately expressed his fear that “my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important trust.” His humility combined affectation with genuine modesty. He had never directed the movements of a massed army or mounted a formal siege. He had been away from active military life for sixteen years. He knew almost nothing about naval affairs, cavalry, engineering, or artillery.

Washington appeared “majestic” as he rode into the camp in Cambridge, his boots polished, his silver spurs gleaming. What he found there appalled him. “Confusion and discord” reigned. The soldiers were unseasoned—most had never been more than twenty miles from their homes. Commander Artemas Ward, sick with a bladder stone, had failed to impose a structure on the jumble of militias.

The troops, Washington noted, had “very little discipline, order, or government.” He could smell the camp from a mile away, a vast shanty town of wood, turf, and canvas. He found the Yankees viscerally repugnant. They were, he felt, “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He observed
“an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”
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Washington had to issue explicit orders for men to use the latrines rather than “ease themselves” where they pleased. Disease had subtracted many from the active duty list, others had simply gone home. Instead of the expected twenty thousand soldiers, a count showed only sixteen thousand.

A twenty-one-year-old captain wrote: “We were all young, and in a manner unacquainted with human nature, quite Novices in Military matters.”
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The men had left their homes, farms, and families to take a stand for a cause. They were independent agents asserting rights that no king or Parliament could abrogate. One observer noted that “the doctrines of independence and levellism have been so effectually sown throughout the country,” that soldiers would not respond to the commands of officers. Washington had to grapple with a deep paradox: the spirit that induced men to take up arms for freedom stood in the way of their becoming effective soldiers.

He had learned from Braddock that an army must be based on hierarchy. “Discipline and subordination,” he declared, “add life to military movements.” To win liberty, the men needed to bend themselves to subservience. Militias might elect unit commanders and allow officers to fraternize with their men—real armies did not. “Great distinction is made between officers and soldiers,” an observer wrote about the new tone Washington brought to the camp. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it.”
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Helping to assert this tone was Charles Lee, who had pored over Thucydides while traveling toward the Monongahela. During the French war, Lee had extended his military resume in Britain and Portugal, and later had served as a soldier of fortune in Poland and Russia. In 1773, he retired to America, where he had found “a magnificence and greatness . . . not equaled in any part of Europe.”
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Lee now served as third in command after Washington and Ward. In the eyes of many, including his own, this experienced officer should have been the supreme commander.

“He is a queer creature,” John Adams noted of Lee. The general had invited Adams’s wife, Abigail, to shake the paw of Spado, one of the pack of dogs that always accompanied him. Contemporaries commented on his striking appearance—“extremely thin; his face ugly, with an aquiline nose of enormous proportions.”
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He was “quarrelsome, satirical, and abusive.” In an age when officers favored lace, silk, and gold braid, he dressed carelessly. Some made him the butt of jokes, others whispered about “Mad Lee.”

The slovenly Lee and the meticulous Washington, both forty-three, became for a time the odd couple of the Revolution. But Lee knew his
business. After his appointment, Washington consulted books to brush up on military strategy. Lee didn’t need to.

On a tour of the fortifications opposite Boston Neck, both generals were impressed by the efforts of the young artilleryman Henry Knox. They expressed “the greatest pleasure and surprise,” Knox wrote excitedly to Lucy, who was sharing the home of a patriot in Watertown, eight miles from Boston. But Knox’s breastworks were one of the few elements of the situation that the generals could feel good about. The army’s lack of gunpowder was frightening. When he arrived, Washington was informed that he had only 308 barrels of powder for the entire army, a paltry supply. Later, he found that there had been a miscalculation. The amount of powder on hand was 36 barrels, a mere nine rounds per man. On receiving the news, Washington “did not utter a word for half an hour.”

“Could I have foreseen what I have and am like to experience,” he wrote, “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”
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Some soldiers were equipped only with spears.

What puzzled the American commander was why the British did not simply march out of the city and rout the ragtag army, which would have found it impossible to defend its nine miles of lines. Was it Gage’s innate caution? Howe’s Whig sympathies? British hopes of reconciliation? The sting of the slaughter at Bunker Hill? Washington found himself “unable upon any principle whatever to account for their silence, unless it be to lull us into a fatal security.”
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Time was working against the Americans. The men who had marched to Boston on a moment’s notice had never expected to stay more than a few weeks or months. They would enjoy some excitement, give the redcoats a thrashing, and go home. Now the drudgery and drill were taking a toll. “The soldiers in general,” one noted, “are most heartily sick of the service.” In August Washington informed Congress that “the greater part of the troops are in a state not far from mutiny,” and feared “the army must absolutely break up.”

Patriots were also grumbling. Pamphleteer Thomas Paine thought Washington had “chilled” the revolutionary fire that had flared at Concord and Bunker Hill by adopting a strategy of “cold defense.” His criticism stung Washington, who was acutely sensitive to the “esteem of mankind.” The commander was in fact constitutionally averse to stalemate. He simply lacked the means to act.

Added to Washington’s worries was an epidemic of smallpox. The disease hit Boston in the fall of 1775 and was rampant among troops and civilians by the middle of December. Two-thirds of victims were incapacitated for weeks, the rest killed outright.

The enlistments of the militia units began to run out that autumn. More soldiers would leave in mid-December, all would be gone by the end of the year. Washington cajoled and pleaded with his men, but most were more than eager to go home. Only gradually did he begin to sign soldiers to the new Continental Army, with longer terms of enlistment. For now, Washington found himself in command of a force destined to evaporate before his eyes.

Faced with the task of beating the British on the battlefield, Washington despaired. Militia had shown that they could acquit themselves well when, as at Bunker Hill, they could fight on the defensive from behind fortifications. To ask them to storm the city was to ask the impossible. The lack of ammunition made the prospect even more remote.

Yet on September 11, the commander in chief proposed to his top officers that they row troops across the bay in hundreds of boats to attack the British, a desperate attempt that he admitted was “hazardous.” It may be that Washington’s boldness was intended to disguise from his own officers their perilous situation. In any case, the others voted for prudence and the attack did not happen.

His Excellency felt the burden of command. “The reflection upon my situation and that of this army,” he wrote, “produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in.”
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One thing he knew, as he pondered the standoff through the sleepless hours, was that an effort must be made somewhere, and soon. Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen had cleared the way up the Hudson-Champlain waterway. To the north lay a vast territory protected by only a few scant regiments. Washington decided to take a chance and embrace a scheme that had been bruited about all summer. The rebels would invade Canada.