Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (8 page)

On the opposite side of the peninsula, Daniel Morgan and his riflemen were marching into Lower Town at the head of the main body of six hundred soldiers that Colonel Arnold commanded.

“Covering the locks of our guns with the lappets of our coats,” Private John Joseph Henry recorded, “holding down our heads (for it was impossible to bear up our faces against the imperious storm of snow and wind),
we ran along the foot of the hill in single file.”
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Unseen defenders fired down on them from the walls, which loomed on the rocky promontory to the men’s right.

When they reached one of the barricades blocking the road, Arnold ordered Morgan and his riflemen to assault the obstacle. The riflemen surged forward. They ran to the log wall and fired point blank through the loopholes. The shots echoed, the flashes lit the swirling snow. A fragment of a ricocheting ball tore through Arnold’s left calf. Unable to stand, his boot overflowing with blood, he allowed himself to be helped to the rear.

Morgan ordered a scaling ladder placed against the barrier and, he later reported, “for fear the business might not be executed with spirit, I mounted myself.” A musket blast scorched his face. He fell back. Enraged, he rose and scrambled up again. His momentum carried him over the parapet. He landed on a cannon, “which hurt me exceedingly.” As the riflemen swarmed over the top behind him, fifty enemy soldiers fled in panic. Dozens surrendered as the Americans rushed into buildings beyond.
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A number of the officers present outranked Captain Morgan, but in the crisis, the younger men deferred to his age, size, and air of cold command. The Virginia rifleman took charge. The moment was ripe. Enemy soldiers, especially the French-Canadian militiamen, were surrendering. Panic was gripping the populace. Some townspeople were welcoming the invaders with shouts of
Vive la liberté!
The tide seemed to have turned. The arrival of Montgomery’s contingent from the opposite direction would hammer home the victory.

General Carleton did not panic. He sent his limited force of defenders to the northern walls to fire down on Arnold’s men as they streamed into the Lower Town. Amid the chaos, Carleton made two critical decisions. First, he marshaled defenders to rush out and take a stand against the Americans at a second barricade closer to the city walls. Then he sent sixty of his scant remaining men through the Palace Gate on the northwest side of the fortified city. They would tread in the footsteps of Arnold’s men to attack them from behind.

General Montgomery had still not arrived. Morgan urged that they should rush ahead and assault the town as planned. But now the others asserted their rank. Leaving a mass of prisoners lightly guarded in their rear would be a mistake. It made more sense to solidify their gains and wait for Montgomery. A frustrated Morgan argued to no avail.

Time ticked away. An impatient Morgan went to look for troops who had gotten lost near the docks. A tepid light was staining the eastern sky. When enemy troops began to congregate at the second barrier, the American officers finally allowed Morgan to attack. Running ahead with
his riflemen, he collided with British regulars. A lieutenant demanded his surrender. Morgan’s answer was to shoot him in the head. But enemy fire now forced the Americans to take cover in doorways. They tried to pick off the soldiers firing from the second barricade. Morgan moved among them, encouraging and rallying. From the center of the street, he directed their fire. “Betwixt every peal the awful voice of Morgan is heard,” one of the riflemen remembered, “whose gigantic stature and terrible appearance carries dismay among the foe wherever he comes.”

The gray light of a snowy day revealed the dire situation: facing defenders far more familiar with the lay of the land, the Americans found the momentum of the battle going against them, and still no sign of General Montgomery. Morgan continued to urge on his troops. “He seems to be all soul,” the account continued, “and moves as if he did not touch the earth.”
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But the attackers’ situation continued to erode. The British regulars advancing from behind captured some Americans who had gotten lost in the urban maze. The British took up a defensive position at the first barricade, hemming in the Americans between the two walls. The prospect of victory dissolved as groups of disorganized patriot soldiers began to surrender rather than be killed. Morgan pushed for an immediate escape attempt. The other officers overruled him.

As he saw men throwing down their weapons around him, Morgan “stormed and raged.” He broke into tears of angry frustration. He would not give up. He would not concede that the awful ordeal had been for nothing. But surrounded, backed against a wall, he finally had to relinquish his sword.

The attack was over. In three and a half hours, 60 Americans had been killed or wounded, 426 captured. More than a third of the army in Canada had been wiped away. For all they knew, the American cause may have gone down to defeat with them.

Morgan and the others were taken to an improvised prison. A British officer wrote home, “You can have no conception of the Kind of men composed their officers. Of those we took, one major was a blacksmith, another a hatter. Of their captains there was a butcher . . . a tanner, a shoemaker, a tavern keeper, etc. Yet they all pretended to be gentlemen.”
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The Americans soon learned why General Montgomery had never arrived on the scene that snowy night. As he had rushed through the barricade with the lead unit of his forlorn hope, defenders in the blockhouse had greeted them with the roar of a cannon. The charge of grapeshot, a mass of lead balls that turned the piece into a giant shotgun, “mowed them down like grain,” one of the defenders observed. Montgomery and six of his officers were torn apart. The shock induced the others to turn back. Fortune had indeed baffled the expectations of poor mortals.

* * *

Montgomery instantly became a symbol of the sacrifice that was required to win Liberty. The fall of a great man testified to the seriousness of the cause. “Weep, America,” an officer wrote to Montgomery’s brother-in-law, “for thou hast lost one of thy most virtuous and bravest sons!”

America wept. Congress voted to erect a monument in Montgomery’s honor. “In the Death of this gentleman,” Washington wrote, “America has sustained a heavy Loss.”
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Janet Montgomery never remarried. She lived for half a century, treasuring the memory of the man she called “an angel sent to us for a
moment.” Childless, she corresponded with some of the many children named for her late husband, encouraging them to live up to his virtues.

Americans had entered the conflict convinced that free warriors fighting for liberty could vanquish professional soldiers. The notion held both truth and falsehood. At Concord, at Bunker Hill, and in the phenomenal feat of arms that was the invasion of Canada, spirit and patriotism had made up, in part, for discipline and experience. Amateur soldiers and neophyte officers had come close to snuffing out British sovereignty in North America. The men who attacked Quebec had marched with hopeful hearts. They had learned the lessons that Montgomery had understood before they started: that war is cruel, fortune fickle, liberty costly.

Washington sat frustrated before Boston, his army evaporating, recruitment slow, supplies lacking, the first heat of enthusiasm for the cause gone. In the spring, British reinforcements would arrive in numbers. He needed a victory.

Five

Precious Convoy

1776

With the British fortified in Boston, any patriot victory there was going to require heavy artillery. Washington turned his attention to the cannon at Ticonderoga. “The want of them is so great,” he wrote, “that no trouble or expense must be spared to obtain them.”
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He reached into the ranks and chose Henry Knox as the man who might wrestle the heavy guns to Boston.

The commander in chief had an extraordinary knack for reading men and for sensing ability. Having seen experts like Braddock fail, he understood that an officer needed imagination and vision as well as knowledge and experience. Politics would inevitably push mediocre candidates to the fore, but Washington vowed to advance his officers on merit only. Knox was twenty-five and unblooded. Washington gambled by recommending him over more experienced veterans to take charge of all American artillery. He saw a canniness in the young man, a toughness and intelligence that inspired trust, a creativity and initiative that suggested Knox could handle a task most deemed impossible.

From his wide reading, Henry Knox knew that cannon, after their invention during the late Middle Ages, had remained so immensely heavy and cumbersome that they had served mainly as tools to besiege and defend forts and to turn ships into floating platforms of destruction. Gunmakers of the eighteenth century had created lighter, more mobile weapons. Field guns, wheeled into position on carriages, had proven their potency during the Seven Years’ War. Canister shot had scythed lines of musketeers,
just as it had cut down Montgomery’s forlorn hope at Quebec. Big guns sometimes bore the motto
ultima ratio regum,
the last argument of kings. When they were well used, that argument was unanswerable.

On November 16, 1775, while the invasion of Canada still hung in the balance, Knox kissed Lucy, now pregnant, and rode off with his nineteen-year-old brother William on a roundabout trip to Ticonderoga. Neither young man had traveled far from their native town and both excitedly looked forward to seeing New York City, where they arrived nine days later.

Knox wrote to Lucy with a tourist’s awe. The brick houses in New York were “three stories high, with the largest kind of windows.” The churches, colleges, and workshops were all grand, and the streets wider than Boston’s. “The people—why the people are magnificent,” he reported, although he found some profane or tending to Toryism. He added: “My Lucy is perpetually in my mind, constantly in my heart.”
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At Ticonderoga, Knox gazed on war supplies that would make any artilleryman’s mouth water. In addition to field guns the armaments included heavy siege pieces larger than any cannon Knox had seen. He examined forty-three guns ranging from 3-pounders, which could do enormous damage at short range, to a huge, eleven-foot-long cannon weighing 5,000 pounds and capable of blasting to pieces any fortification on the continent. The short-barreled mortars and howitzers could heave bombs as big as pumpkins.

Knox understood that a cannon required a great thickness of metal to assure that the explosion did not rip the barrel apart, as it had burst the shotgun that mangled his hand during his innocent duck hunt. Thick metal made the guns dauntingly heavy. All told, Knox figured the artillery he wanted weighed 120,000 pounds. The way to move such behemoths was by boat, but the water route to Boston was closed to him. He had no choice but to do the impossible: transport this massive cargo more than three hundred miles over land. Timing and weather were critical. He had to get the guns down Lake George before the water froze and blocked the movement of boats. Then he had to hope for snow. Only on sleds—“slays” Knox called them—could the heavy guns be moved forward. “Without sledding,” he wrote, “the roads are so much gullied that it will be impossible to move a step.”
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Once crews had manhandled the guns up the short portage from the fort, Knox arranged barges to carry them down Lake George and left William to supervise that phase of the journey. He hurried to Fort George at the other end of the thirty-two-mile-long lake and, improvising as he went, contracted for forty-two huge, custom-built sleds, each designed to
hold as much as 5,400 pounds. He rounded up oxen from local farmers and hired experienced teamsters to drive the animals. He managed to procure more than half a mile of three-inch-thick rope for hauling the guns uphill and for keeping them from running away on downgrades.

By December 16, after an arduous trip down the lake, the guns were at Fort George. All Knox needed now was snow. “It is not easy,” Knox wrote to Washington, “to conceive the difficulties we have had.”
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Knox was a muscular man and the Revolutionary War was fought in the age of muscle. Most work during the eighteenth century was accomplished by the exertions of men or draft animals. Building, pumping, cutting, clearing, lifting, gathering, digging, hauling, plowing—all were accomplished by the strength of sinews. Muscle powered war as well. Men marched. Horses carried saber-swinging fighters. Attacking troops killed with bayonet thrusts. Draft animals hauled guns and supplies. Human hands dug trenches and piled breastworks.

But the machine age had begun to enter the military realm, and gunpowder weapons, not muscles, were swiftly becoming the key force on the battlefield. Firearms, simple machines fueled by a highly energetic mixture, significantly extended a man’s capacity to kill. When Benjamin Franklin suggested to General Charles Lee that the rebel army, strapped for gunpowder, fight with bow and arrow, the military man smiled at the antediluvian notion.

Muskets could be lethal at short range, but it was the big guns that held the most unprecedented power. Their possibilities, intricacies, and authority appealed to curious and farsighted men like Knox. Artillery pieces represented humans’ furthest advance in shaping metal on a large scale. They accelerated projectiles to speeds that surpassed the limits of human vision. The gunner was a new breed of warrior, one who has become familiar today. He fought indirectly, servicing a machine that killed and destroyed at a distance.

But moving guns, Knox knew, depended on the efforts of oxen, horses, and strong men. It depended on muscle. With the guns past the lake, Knox wrote to Washington predicting that he would arrive at Cambridge by New Year and “present your Excellency with a noble train of artillery.” To Lucy he wrote proudly, “We shall cut no small figure through the country with our cannon.”
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A lack of snow stopped the train in its tracks. Knox pushed on to Albany by himself to arrange for more draft animals and teamsters. He needed cold weather to harden the ice on the Hudson River so that his men could safely cross it with the artillery. He was elated when the temperature dropped on Christmas Eve. By morning, three feet of snow
covered the ground. On January 6, the guns were in Albany. He wasn’t sure the ice would hold, but Knox, anxious to get the guns to Boston, decided to risk crossing the river.

One gun, then another and another made the perilous crossing. A crowd cheered each success. Then a dangerous cracking sound and a huge 18-pounder plunged through the ice. Townspeople spontaneously pitched in to help drag the gun back to the surface. Knox thanked them by naming the piece the
Albany.

He galloped ahead to scout the road and make arrangements for the caravan. They would wind through eastern New York before entering the Berkshire Mountains and crossing the entire state of Massachusetts from west to east. In addition to presenting a formidable obstacle, the mountains appeared to the untraveled Knox as towering heights. The amazing view prompted him to write that from these peaks he could “have almost seen all the kingdoms of the earth.”
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Moving the artillery through these mountains, where roads were rudimentary or nonexistent, strained his resources. Eight horses were sometimes needed to drag the largest guns. On descents, the teamsters tied check lines and spread brush and chains under the sleds’ runners to control the weight. Men and animals quickly became exhausted. The disheartened teamsters threatened to quit. Knox engaged in “three hours of persuasion,” appealing to their patriotism to convince them to continue.

The “precious convoy” wound through mountain passes and thick forests. Sometimes the men traveled forty miles without seeing a house. When they reached Westfield, Massachusetts, twelve-year-old John Becker, the son of one of the teamsters, noted, “Our armament here was a great curiosity. We found that very few, even among the oldest inhabitants, had ever seen a cannon.” Knox fired a 24-pounder to impress the locals.
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* * *

“I am in daily expectation of colonel Knox’s arrival,” Washington wrote in January 1776. The artillery Knox was bringing “is much needed.” The commander himself was in need of good news. A paltry number of new troops were signing up to replace the militiamen whose enlistments were expiring. His army remained dangerously vulnerable to a British attack. Word had just reached him through General Schuyler of “a severe check” in the north. The assault on Quebec had failed. Many of the soldiers were in captivity. General Montgomery was dead.

Then Knox arrived at Cambridge to report that his cargo was making good time along the Boston post road. The worst of the long trip was
over. He had demonstrated exactly the combination of ingenuity and persistence that Washington knew would be needed to accomplish extraordinary things and to win the war.

Knox learned that Congress had appointed him colonel and put him in charge of the Continental Army’s 635 artillerymen and of all its heavy guns, gunpowder, and ammunition. He had soared into the lofty circle of his Excellency’s confidants, and on February 1, he and Lucy dined with Washington and his wife. The expectant mother’s manners, wit, and enthusiasm endeared her to Martha.

“My charmer,” Knox called his wife.

Over in Boston, Lucy’s family waited with other loyalists for life to return to normal. Her sister Sally was acting in a cheery romance,
Maid of the Oaks,
written by the debonair British general John Burgoyne and staged to keep up the loyalists’ morale in the dismal, besieged city.

The arrival of the guns was a boon for Washington. But how to use them? This was no ordinary siege. Geography favored the British, who were isolated on two virtual islands and in possession of a supply line by sea. Ordinary siegecraft—extending trenches and moving guns steadily closer—could not force them out.

Mounting guns on Dorchester Heights, just south of the city, held intriguing possibilities, but Washington suspected that General Howe had left the position unoccupied as a lure. If the Americans took the bait, Dorchester might become the anvil against which the British hammer would crush the Continental Army. His Excellency kept jumping up and down on the bay ice to see if it could hold assault troops.

What to do? Washington had the machines to deliver a blow against the enemy. But with gunpowder still scarce, he lacked the fuel to operate them. Nevertheless, he preferred to attack. By February, the bay ice was firm. “A stroke well-aimed at this critical juncture might put a final end to the war,” Washington told his officers on February 16.
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He raised the possibility of a night attack led by troops on ice skates. Nathanael Greene calculated that any attack “would be horrible if it succeeded and still more horrible if it failed.” The council voted to wait for promised troops and more powder. “Powder!” cried Israel Putnam, the Connecticut veteran and oldest of the generals. “Ye gods, give us powder!”
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Two days later, word arrived that 3,000 pounds of gunpowder from Connecticut was on its way. Now Washington’s focus had pivoted to Dorchester Heights. General Howe had already declared he would not tolerate an American occupation of that strategic neck. Perhaps the lure could work both ways. If the rebels could put guns on the heights and provoke the British commander, they might defeat his forces in a decisive battle.

Knox gave his opinion. With cannon on the high ground at Dorchester, his gunners could bring the British lines on Boston Neck under fire. They could even hit Long Wharf, two miles away, and harass British ships supplying the troops. The problem was how to shield the guns and gunners from return fire, especially from British warships, or from an assault by enemy troops. To dig trenches and pile breastworks was not feasible—the ground was frozen solid.

The solution came from a book. Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Putnam, a one-time millwright and cousin of Israel Putnam, had been reading
Field Engineer,
a British military manual. He came across the notion of the “chandelier,” a heavy wooden frame that could be prepared in advance for easy reassembly. The men could stuff the frame with giant baskets called gabbions and load those with stones and earth to block enemy fire. Knox thought the prefabricated fortifications might work, but only if they could be erected quickly, before the British guns had a chance to sweep the hilltop.

Now experienced at moving heavy artillery, Knox busied himself preparing to transport a portion of his armament onto the heights. His men wrangled the rest of the cannon into emplacements in Roxbury to the south of Boston and Cobble Hill to the north. He distributed ammunition and made sure his men were prepared to service their machines.

This was to be Washington’s first great gamble. If it failed, the shaky Continental Army could be crushed, the guns lost, the rebellion extinguished. Even civilians sensed an approaching climax. “Something terrible it will be,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, who was attending to the business of Congress in Philadelphia. “It has been said ‘tomorrow’ and ‘tomorrow’ for this month, but when the dreadful tomorrow will be, I know not.”
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On March 2, tomorrow arrived. As night descended, Knox gave orders to his gunners. They put smoldering matches to the touch holes of their cannon.

Adams went to a knoll near her home in Braintree, ten miles from Boston. She heard “the amazing roar of cannon,” a sound she described as “one of the grandest in nature.” The concussions plowed the night, the hills echoed in applause. Inside the city, a British colonel wrote, “At nine o’clock . . . they began a pretty hot cannonade and bombardment.” Shells “tore several houses to pieces.”
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