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July 21 - September 4, 2023
Yet no one could foresee that the American War of Independence would last 3,059 days.
Roughly a quarter million Americans would serve the cause in some military capacity. At least one in ten of them would die for that cause—25,674 deaths by one tally, as many as 35,800 by another.
The odds were heavily stacked against the Americans: no colonial rebellion had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. But, as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come.
And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.
The first was in the United Kingdom, where the reduction of the empire by about one-third, including the demolition of the new dominions in North America, proved to be as divisive as any misfortune to befall the nation in the eighteenth century, at a cost of £128 million and thousands of British lives. The broader conflict that began in 1778, with the intervention of European powers on America’s behalf, led to the only British defeat in the seven Anglo-French wars fought between 1689 and 1815.
The second consequence was epochal and enduring: the creation of the American republic.
Beyond the battlefield, then and forever, stood a shining city on a hill.
Among the neighbors it was rumored that after almost two decades in London, Dr. Franklin was going home.
His 1751 treatise Experiments and Observations on Electricity brought international fame for discoveries lauded by a contemporary as “the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton.” He not only invented the first device for storing electrical charges, he also named it—the battery—as he named other things in this new field: conductor, charge, discharge, armature.
But by degree he had grown vexed, then angry at what he called the “insolence, contempt, and abuse” of arrogant British officials toward his countrymen; the condescending reference to Americans as “foreigners” infuriated him.
His writings turned acerbic: he proposed to answer the British practice of shipping convicts to America by exporting rattlesnakes to England,
He had made a serious error of judgment, but so had Britain, by demeaning the Crown’s best American ally in promoting imperial harmony.
He promptly started a letter to William, which began, “Dear Son” and grew to twenty thousand words on 250 foolscap pages, as it became a detailed account of his failed diplomacy in Britain. That failure had taught him lessons in patience, tact, intrigue, and power—lessons that would prove useful, since his best days as a diplomat, perhaps the greatest America ever produced, still lay ahead of him.
The bells of Philadelphia would ring for joy upon his arrival six weeks hence. The man who had felt “like a thing out of place” would find his rightful place. Among the slurs hurled at him in the Cockpit was the accusation of being a “true incendiary.” That much was certain, as befitted the American Prometheus. He was the best of his breed, this kite flier, this almanac maker, this lightning tamer. The Pennsylvania Packet shrugged off her moorings and crowded on sail, bearing him home, where he belonged.
Samuel Adams was ready for them. An undistinguished petty official who had squandered a family malthouse fortune, Adams ran an impressive political organization, deftly shaping public opinion through a newspaper syndicate that for years had told other colonies—often with lurid hyperbole—what life was like in a free town occupied by combat troops.
Warren invoked the long struggle to carve a country from the New England wilderness.
the shootings five years before that left “the stones bespattered with your father’s brains.” Then came the Coercive Acts, insult upon injury.
They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall.
Thomas Gage was a mild, sensible man with a mild, sensible countenance; only a slight protrusion of his lower lip suggested truculence. Now in his mid-fifties, with thinning gray hair and a fixed gaze, he was the most powerful authority in North America as both military commander in chief and the royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
The London Book-Store in Cornhill, owned by gregarious young Henry Knox, offered lottery tickets and globes showing the reach of that empire on which the sun never set.
Drunk or sober, redcoats were lured by Americans who offered farm-smock disguises, escape horses, and three hundred acres to any absconding regular. Estimates of British Army desertions over the past year ranged from 120 to more than 200.
more than twenty thousand British seamen had jumped ship in American ports since early in the century, and nearly another eighty thousand—almost 14 percent of all jack-tars who served—would abscond during the coming war, including those who deserted in home waters.
(A lieutenant colonelcy in a foot regiment might cost £3,500.)
The expected orders arrived on Friday, April 14, when a burly, flush-faced dragoon captain bounded into Boston from the Nautilus.
He knew that several dozen men, mostly artisans and mechanics, routinely met at the Green Dragon Tavern, a two-story brick building with symmetrical chimneys, to coordinate surveillance of British troop movements; at each meeting they swore themselves to secrecy on a Bible.
Gorgets hung by neck cords at the officers’ throats—small silver or gilt crescents worn as an emblem of rank, a last remnant of medieval armor.
For all his legendary bravura, Revere’s life was stained with tragedy: he would father sixteen children, his “little lambs,” and most would die before their time.
As Revere intended, rebel leaders beyond the Charles now knew that British troops were on the move via Back Bay—two if by sea—rather than taking the more circuitous, one-if-by-land route through Roxbury.
Massachusetts Bay had been the first colony to form its militia into regiments, one per county in 1636, in an effort to fashion a military organization suitable for more than haphazard local defense. Each generation since had gone to war at least once; an estimated one in four able-bodied Massachusetts men had served in the last French war.
A single gunshot sounded above the clamor, possibly a warning shot or a sniper at Buckman Tavern.
Lexington had been not a battle, or even a skirmish, but an execution. The only British casualties were two privates, lightly wounded by gunshots, and Pitcairn’s horse, nicked twice in the flank. The American tally was far worse. Eight rebels were dead, nine wounded. Of those slain, only two bodies lay on the original American line.
Concord was ready for them. Paul Revere had been captured by a British mounted patrol at a bend in the road near Folly Pond, but William Dawes managed to escape at a gallop.
“It seemed as if men came down from the clouds,” another witness recalled. Some took posts on the two bridges spanning the Concord River, which looped west and north of town.
Captain David Brown, who lived with his wife, Abigail, and ten children two hundred yards uphill from the bridge, shouted, “God damn them, they are firing balls! Fire, men, fire!” The cry became an echo, sweeping the ranks: “Fire! For God’s sake, fire!” The crash of muskets rose to a roar.
As Noah Parkhurst from Lincoln observed moments after the shooting stopped, “Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”
To lift spirits, fifers played a ditty first heard in a Philadelphia comic opera in 1767, with lyrics since improvised by British soldiers: Yankee Doodle came to town For to buy a firelock; We will tar and feather him And so we will John Hancock.
Had the column not veered away, a senior British general later concluded, “there would have been an end that day of British government in America.”
A thousand campfires glittered from the high ground in a semicircle around Boston, tracing the contours of the siege that would last for almost a year.
British rule in New England now ended at Boston’s town limits.
British casualties totaled 273, nearly 15 percent of the total force that marched into Middlesex on April 19; of those, 73 men were killed or would die of their wounds. American casualties numbered 95, over half of them—49—dead.
For all the chaos of the day, the Americans had demonstrated impressive organizational skills, although combat leadership above the grade of captain had been erratic and sometimes nonexistent. Each militia company had essentially fought alone, improvising without tactical orchestration from higher command.
Later scholars calculated that at least seventy-five thousand American rounds had been fired, using well over a ton of powder, but only one bullet in almost three hundred had hit home. The shot heard round the world likely missed.
Two men led the raid in an unsteady collaboration: a strapping, profane, sometime farmer, lead miner, and tosspot philosopher named Ethan Allen and a short, gifted Connecticut apothecary, merchant prince, and hothead named Benedict Arnold,
For now, the “acts of burglarious enterprise,” in one British writer’s description, gave the Americans control not only of Ticonderoga—the most strategic inland position on the continent—but also of the long blue teardrop of Lake Champlain, the traditional invasion route into, or out of, Canada.
Provisions grew short, prices soared, fresh food vanished. “Pork and beans one day,” Andrews wrote, “and beans and pork another.”
Two alluring patches of high ground remained unfortified, and Gage knew from an informant that American commanders coveted the same slopes: the elevation beyond Boston Neck known as the Dorchester Heights, and the dominant terrain above Charlestown called Bunker, or Bunker’s Hill.
But it was three newcomers who drew the eye this morning: Major Generals William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton had reached Boston in late May aboard the Cerberus
A jeering rebel who recognized the crippled man being helped from the field shouted, “Colonel Abercrombie, are the Yankees cowards?”
Reverend David Osgood, a New Hampshire regimental chaplain, would recall as an old man how for the remaining eight years of war after Bunker Hill “a burden lay upon my spirits.… Visions of horror rose in my imagination, and disturbed my rest.” A British officer in the 63rd Regiment of Foot could only agree. “The shocking carnage that day,” Major Francis Bushill Sill wrote in a letter home, “never will be erased out of my mind ’till the day of my death.”
PTSD
