Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 6 (of 8) / The United States of North America, Part I

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CHAPTER II.

THE CONFLICT PRECIPITATED.

BY JUSTIN WINSOR,

The Editor.

"YOU must be firm, resolute, and cautious; but discover no marks of timidity", wrote one from London to James Bowdoin, February 20, 1774.[324] Firm, resolute, cautious, but bold! This was the impelling spirit of the hour. Hutchinson was at the same time writing to Dartmouth that anarchy was likely to increase, till point after point was carried, and every tie of allegiance was severed.[325] Indications were increasing that the conflict of argument and the burst of political passion were before long to give way to the trial of force, and to the inevitable severing of friends which a resort to arms would entail. All this was prefigured on the first of June, 1774, when Hutchinson, bearing with him the addresses of his admirers,[326] left his house on Milton Hill forever, and walked along the road, bidding his neighbors good-bye at their gates; when, as he approached Dorchester Neck, he got into his carriage, which had followed him, and was driven to the point, where he took boat, was conveyed to a frigate, and in a short time was passing out by Boston light, leaving behind the line of ships at their moorings, which, with shotted guns, marked the beginning of the Boston blockade. That severing of friends and that threat of war was at that moment, away off in Virginia, accompanied by the tolling of bells out of sympathy for Boston. The Massachusetts yeomanry had not yet openly seized the musket, but their tribune, Sam. Adams, a few days later, turned the key upon the governor's secretary in Salem, when that officer was sent to dissolve the assembly. It was then that Adams and his associates proceeded to pass votes, with no intention of submitting them to the executive approval,—the beginning of the end, which we have seen Hutchinson but a few months before had anticipated. Between the upper and the nether mill-stone, between the patriots of Massachusetts and the Tories of Parliament, the charter of William and Mary was rapidly crushed. Parliament determined that all power should come from them, and the province leaders determined otherwise. So the distribution of authority provided under the charter ceased. The rival powers in and around Boston could not long abstain from force. Each watched the other, in the hopes of a pretext to be beforehand, without being the aggressor.

On the first of July, 1774, when Hutchinson, in London, was convincing the king that the ministry's aggressive measure was going to bring the recalcitrant Bostonians to terms, Admiral Graves, in his flag-ship, was entering Boston harbor, and new regiments soon followed in their transports. Presently one could count thirty ships of war at their moorings before the town, and the morning drum-beats summoned to the roll-call strong garrisons at Castle William, in Boston itself, and at Salem, now the capital. It was known that arms were stopped, if any one tried to carry them from Boston; and it soon became evident to Gage that it was best to concentrate his force, for he removed his headquarters from Danvers[327] to Boston, and thither his two regiments followed him. Perhaps he had heard of the enthusiasm of a certain young officer, whom he had seen twenty years before, saving all that was saved, on Braddock's bloody day; and how, surviving for the present crisis, he had just declared, in distant Virginia, that he was ready to raise, subsist, and march a thousand men to Boston. Gage must have known George Washington quite as well as the Bostonians did, who were, it is to be feared, better prepared on their part to look upon Israel Putnam, as he marched into town from Connecticut with a drove of sheep for the hungered populace, as a greater hero than the Virginian colonel.

September came in, and it did not look as if the conflict could be put off longer.[328] On the first of that month Gage sent a detachment to the Powder House beyond Quarry Hill, in the present Somerville, and it brought away ammunition and cannon and took them to the castle.

NOTICE OF THE COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

From an original in the volume of Proclamations, etc., in the library of the Mass. Hist. Society.

News of the inroad spread, and on the next day crowds gathered in Cambridge with arms in their hands. They assembled before Lieutenant-Governor Oliver's house[329] and forced him to resign. Joseph Warren, in Boston, heard of the tumult and hastened to the spot. His influence prevailed, and the sun went down without the shedding of blood. It was ominous, however, to Gage, and he set to work rebuilding the old lines across Boston Neck, and constructing barracks. He soon encountered difficulties. Somehow laborers could not be hired, nor provisions be bought. Somehow his freight-barges sunk, his carts of straw got on fire, his wagons were sloughed; and somehow, with all his vigilance, a few young men made up for the loss of the powder-house pieces by stealthily carrying off by night some cannon from Boston,[330] besides some others from an old battery in Charlestown. It was soon found that the men on the Neck lines needed protection, and Admiral Graves tried to send up a sloop of war into the South bay to enfilade the road from Roxbury, if occasion came; but her draught was too much, and so he employed an armed schooner. By November the works were finished. Warren thought them as formidable as Gage could make them, but the old Louisbourg soldiers laughed at them and called them mud walls.

Meanwhile, in October, the military spirit was taking shape throughout the province. On the 5th the legislative assembly, which had met at Salem on Gage's call, though he sought to outlaw them by rescinding (September 28) his precept, had declared his attempted revocation without warrant in law, and had resolved itself into a provincial congress. The body then adjourned to meet in Concord, where, under John Hancock's presidency, they appointed a Committee of Safety to act as the executive of the province, and chose three general officers,—Preble,[331] Ward, and Pomeroy. The militia was organized, and minute-men were everywhere forming into companies. Gordon tells how the country was astir with preparations. Connecticut was not far behind in ordering her militia to be officered, and in directing her towns to double their stock of ammunition, while she voted to issue £15,000 in paper money,—the first of the war.

"An armed truce", wrote Benjamin Church, "is the sole tenure by which the inhabitants of Boston possess life, liberty, and property." Away from Boston, the towns made common cause. "Liberty and Union" was to be read on a flag flying in Taunton. When news of these and similar events reached England, Lord North told Hutchinson that, for aught he could see, it must come to violence, with consequent subjection for the province.[332] When such tidings reached Virginia it found her officers just sheathing their swords after their conflict with the Indians in the mountains, and resolving next to turn their weapons against the oppressors of America. Gage, in Boston, whom Warren really felt to be honest and desirous of an accommodation, was awaking to a juster measure of the task of the ministry, which might, he said, require 20,000 troops to begin with. As he pondered on such views, he might have heard, on the evening of the 9th of November, 1774, the ringing of the bells which greeted the return of Sam. Adams and his colleagues from the Philadelphia congress. Shortly after the middle of the month the British in Boston went into winter quarters.[333] So November passed;—the Committee of Safety had arranged to raise and support an army, and the recommendation of the Continental Congress had been approved.

December came. Boston was not yet burned, as some in London believed it was when Quincy heard them laying wagers in the coffee-houses,[334] and if Sam. Adams was not the first politician in the world, as others told the same ardent young Bostonian, he was sharing conspicuous honors at home, with his distant kinsman, John Adams. The latter, as Novanglus, in his public controversy with the unknown Massachusettensis, was just attracting renewed attention. But that sturdy patriot, while he was arguing in public, was comforting himself in private by reckoning that Massachusetts could put 25,000 men in the field in a week; and New England, he counted, had 200,000 fighting men, "not exact soldiers", he confessed, "but all used to arms."[335] Tidings were coming in which told how this warlike spirit might be tested. Governor Wanton, of Rhode Island, had spirited away from the reach of the British naval officers forty-four cannon, which were at Newport. Paul Revere had gone down to Portsmouth and harangued the Sons of Liberty, till they invaded Fort William and Mary and (December 14, 1774) carried off the powder and cannon.[336] From Maryland, where they had lately been burning a tea-ship,[337] the word was that its convention had ordered the militia to be enrolled. From Pennsylvania it appeared that Thomas Mifflin was conspicuous among the Quakers in advocating the measure of non-intercourse. From South Carolina the news was halting. Could her rice-planters succeed in getting their product excepted from such a plan? They did. Gage had some time before[338] written to Dartmouth that they were as mad in the southern Charlestown as in northern Boston; and when one of their Tory parsons had intimated that clowns should not meddle with politics, they had been as fiery as they could have been in Massachusetts.[339] Gordon, of Jamaica Plain, in appending notes to a sermon which he had just preached on the Provincial Thanksgiving of December 15, 1774, refers to the brave lead of Virginia in the present time, as nine years before she had been foremost in the stamp-act time.[340] Governor Dunmore was reporting to Dartmouth (December, 1774) that every county in Virginia was arming a company of men, to be ready as occasion required.

John Adams, at Philadelphia, read to Patrick Henry from a paper of Joseph Hawley, that the result of the action of the ministry rendered it necessary to fight. "I am of that man's opinion", replied the ardent Virginian.[341] With the new year (1775) that opinion was becoming widespread. Ames' Almanac (1775), published in Boston, was printing, for almost every family in New England to read, "a method for making gunpowder", so that every person "may easily supply himself with a sufficiency of that commodity." Day by day news came to Boston from every direction of the indorsement of Congress, and of the wild-fire speed of the dispersion of the military spirit. Those who remembered the 40,000 men who marched towards Boston at the time of the D'Anville scare, thirty years before, said the enthusiasm then was nothing like the present. Somehow Gage began to feel more confident. He had in January 3,500 men in his Boston garrison, and almost as many more were expected, and he did not hesitate to send (January 23) Captain Balfour and a hundred men, with two cannon, to Marshfield, to protect the two hundred loyalists there, who had signed the articles by which Timothy Ruggles was hoping to band the friends of government together, and the reports which Balfour sent back seemed to satisfy the governor that the measure was effective.[342]

On the first of February, 1775, the second provincial congress assembled at Cambridge, and they soon issued a solemn address to the people, deprecating a rupture, but counselling preparations for it.[343] It was not then known that Gage had won over Dr. Church, and that through this professing patriot the British headquarters in Boston were informed of the doings of congress. Church's defection encouraged the tories, and on the 6th, handbills appeared in Boston, reminding the patriots of the fate of Wat Tyler.[344] A few days later Cambridge was alarmed by the report that troops were coming out of Boston to disperse them; but the day passed without the proof of it. The Committee of Safety were anxious, for they knew that the other colonies and their friends in England were fearful that the conflict would be precipitated without the consent of congress; and the authority of congress was now so dominant that its cognizance of such measures was essential to the continuance of the sympathy with Massachusetts which now existed. No one at this time was more solicitous for this prudent measure than Joseph Hawley, and no one in Massachusetts had a steadier head. On the 18th Peter Oliver wrote from Boston to London: "Great preparations on both sides for an engagement, and the sooner it comes the better."[345] "Every day, every hour widens the breach!" wrote Warren to Arthur Lee, two days later.[346] Already the provincial congress had conferred on the Committee of Safety (February 9) the power to assemble the militia, and John Thomas and William Heath had been added to the general officers. The committee, on the 21st, had voted to buy supplies for 15,000 men, including twenty hogsheads of rum. On the same day Sam. Adams and Warren signed a letter to the friends of liberty in Canada, and secret messengers were already passing that way. Presently, on the 26th, the impending conflict was once more averted.

Colonel David Mason, of Salem, had been commissioned by the Committee of Safety as an engineer, and was now at work in that town mounting some old cannon which had been taken from the French. Gage heard of it, and by his orders a transport appeared at Marblehead, with about 300 men under Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie, who rapidly landed and marched his men to Salem. Their purpose was seasonably divined; the town was aroused, and, in the presence of a mob, the commander thought it safer to turn upon his steps.[347] A British officer, Colonel Smith, with one John Howe, was at about the same time sent out in disguise to scour the country towards Worcester, and pick up news for Gage;[348] and two others, Brown and Bernière, were a few weeks later prowling about Concord.[349] The patriots did not scour for news. It came in like the wind,—now of county meetings, now of drills, now of Colonel Washington's ardor in Virginia, and now of Judge Drayton's charge to the grand jury in Carolina.

ROADS OF ROXBURY AND BEYOND.

Sketched from a MS. map in the library of Congress, which is apparently one of the maps made by Gage's secret parties of observation.

Early in March came the anniversary of the Boston massacre. Two days before, Judge Auchmuty, in Boston, wrote to Hutchinson: "I don't see any reason to expect peace and order until the fatal experiment of arms is tried.... Bloodshed and desolation seem inevitable."[350] While this tory was writing thus, the patriots, in a spirit that somewhat belied their professed wish to avoid a conflict, were arranging for a public commemoration of the massacre. It could have been omitted without any detriment to the cause, and to observe it could easily have begotten trouble amid the inflamed passions of both sides. "We may possibly be attacked in our trenches", said Sam. Adams. It little conduced to peace that Joseph Warren was selected to deliver the address, which, as the fifth came on Sunday, was delivered on Monday, the sixth. The concourse of people suggested to Warren to enter the Old South meeting-house, where the crowd was assembled, by a ladder put against a window in the rear of the pulpit. Forty British officers were present, and the moderator offered them front seats, and some of the officers placed themselves on the pulpit stairs. A contemporary story says that it was a set purpose of the officers to break up the meeting,[351] and that one of them took an egg in his pocket, to be thrown at the speaker for a signal. This man tripped as he entered the building, and the egg was broken before its time. Another officer, below the desk, held up some bullets in his open palm as Warren warmed in his eloquence. The speaker quietly dropped his handkerchief on the leaden menace, and went on. So the meeting came to an end, with no outbreak; though there was some hissing and pounding of canes when the vote of thanks was put. As the crowd came out of the meeting-house there was an apprehensive moment,[352] for the Forty-third Regiment chanced to be passing, with beating drums, and for an instant the outcome was uncertain.[353] Gage had suffered the commemoration to pass without recognition, but ten days later his officers made the event the subject of a provoking burlesque, when Dr. Thomas Bolton delivered from the balcony of the British Coffee House in King Street a mock oration in ridicule of Warren, Hancock, and Adams.[354] There was no knowing what purpose this ridicule might mask; and a committee of the patriots, mostly mechanics, were constantly following the progress of events, meeting secretly at the Green Dragon[355] for consultation, and setting watches at Charlestown, Cambridge, and Roxbury, to give warning if there were any signs that the royal troops were preparing to move from the town.

On the 22d March, 1775, the provincial congress assembled again at Concord, and set to work in organizing their army, and in devising an address to the Mohawks, with the purpose of securing them to the patriot side. They also prepared to use the Stockbridge Indians as mediators with their neighbors, who were already tampered with, as was believed or alleged, by emissaries from Canada. It was already known that the people of the New Hampshire Grants were preparing to seize Ticonderoga as soon as the war-cloud should burst.

BETWEEN BOSTON AND MARLBOROUGH.

Sketched from a MS. map in the library of Congress, which is seemingly the original or copy of the map made by one of Gage's secret parties sent to observe the country.

News sped rapidly by relays of riders. It was not long after Patrick Henry had said in Virginia, "We must fight; an appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left for us",[356] before the words were familiar in Massachusetts, and John Adams, who knew, said that Virginia was planting wheat instead of tobacco. At Providence they were burning tea in the streets, and men went about erasing the advertisements of the obnoxious herb from the shop-windows. Everywhere they were quoting the incendiary speech of John Wilkes, the lord mayor of London, whose retorts upon the ministry were relished as they were read in the public prints. As if to test whether March should pass without bloodshed,[357] Gage on the 30th sent Earl Percy out of town with a brigade, in light marching order, and he went four miles, to Jamaica Plain, and returned. The minute-men gathered in the neighboring towns, but no encounter took place.[358]

So April came, with the rattle of the musket still unheard. On the second day two vessels arrived at Marblehead, bringing tidings that Parliament had pledged its support to the king and his ministers, and that more troops were coming. On the 8th a committee reported to the provincial congress on an armed alliance of the New England colonies, and messengers were sent to the adjacent governments.[359] Connecticut responded with equipping six regiments; New Hampshire organized her forces as a part "of the New England army", and Rhode Island voted to equip fifteen hundred men. In Virginia it looked for a while as if the appeal to arms would not be long delayed, for Dunmore fulminated against their convention; and he even threatened to turn the slaves against their masters, and he did seize the powder at Williamsburg, of which the province had small store at best. Calmer counsels prevailed, and the armed men who had gathered at Fredericksburg dispersed to reassemble at call.

The contest meanwhile had been precipitated in Massachusetts. The rumor had already gone to England that it was close at hand. Hutchinson, in London, on the 10th, when writing to his son in Boston, had said: "Before this reaches you it will be determined;" and while tidings of the actual conflict was on the way, Hutchinson learned in London that Pownall had been prepared by letters from Boston for something startling.[360] The circle of sympathizers with America were in this suspense while Franklin was on the ocean, hither bound, and, if we may believe Strahan, he had left England in a rancorous state of mind, causing men to wonder what he intended on arriving, whether to turn general and fight, or to bolster in other ways the spirits of the rebels.[361] When he arrived the fight had begun.

On the 15th of April the provincial congress had adjourned. On the 16th, Isaiah Thomas spirited his press out of Boston and took it to Worcester, where, in a little more than a fortnight, the Massachusetts Spy reappeared.[362] Families, impressed with the forebodings of the sky, were moving out of town. Samuel Adams and Hancock had been persuaded to retire to Lexington,[363] to be beyond the grasp of Gage, who was shortly expected to order the arrest of the patriots, for which he had had instructions since March 18th.[364] The Boston committee of observation was watchful. It had noticed that on the 14th the "Somerset" frigate had changed her moorings to a position intermediate between Boston and Charlestown, and on the 15th the transports were hauled near the men-of-war. Notice of these signs was sent to Hancock and Adams, and preparations were begun for removing a part of the stores at Concord. When, during the afternoon of the 18th, some of the precious cannon were trundled into Groton, her minute-men gathered for a night march to Concord. During that same day Gage sent out from Boston some officers to patrol the roads towards Concord, and intercept the patriot messengers, and to discover, if possible, the lurking-place of Adams and Hancock. In the evening it was observed in Boston that troops were marching across the Common to the inner bay. William Dawes was at once dispatched to Concord by way of Roxbury, for the patriot watch had not been without information before the troops actually moved. Gordon tells us that they got a warning from a "daughter of liberty unequally yoked in point of politics", and as Gage's wife was a daughter of Peter Kemble, of New Jersey, it has been surmised that the informer may have been one very near to headquarters.[365] Paul Revere immediately caused the preconcerted signal-light to be set in a church-tower at the north end of Boston, and crossing the river in a boat, he mounted a horse on the Charlestown side and started on his famous midnight ride. It was none too soon. At eleven o'clock eight hundred men, under Lieutenant-Colonel Smith, were passing over the back bay in boats to Lechmere Point. Here they landed at half past two in the morning, and the moon at this hour was well up. They marched quietly and rapidly, but not unobserved, and when they approached Lexington Green they found drawn up there a company of minute-men. Smith had become alarmed when, as he was advancing, he found the country aroused in every direction, and sent back for reinforcements. Earl Percy, with the succor, was by some stupidity[366] delayed, and did not get off from Boston till between nine and ten the next morning, and he then took the circuitous route by Roxbury and Cambridge.

The critical moment on Lexington Green had then long passed. Major Pitcairn, who commanded Smith's advance-guard, would not or could not prevent that fatal volley in the early morning light, by which several of the small body of provincials were killed before they broke, while, by a scattering return fire, one or two of the British were wounded.[367] Smith, without being aware that Hancock and Adams were at the moment within sound of his musketry, and just then being conducted farther from his reach, waited while his troops gave three cheers, and then resumed his march, passing on towards Concord. The provincials gathered their dead and wounded, and managed as the British passed on to pick up a few stragglers, the first prisoners of the war.[368]

On the redcoats went as the day broadened.[369] They followed the road much as it runs to-day, though in places steeps and impediments are now avoided by a better grade. Their march went by the spots which the genius of Hawthorne and Emerson have converted into shrines. In the centre of Concord they halted, while the gathering provincials, who had retired before them, watched the smoke of devastation. Smith had detailed two detachments to find and destroy stores. One of these, sent to Colonel Barrett's, beyond the North Bridge, had some success, and while it was absent the provincials, now increased in numbers from the neighboring towns, approached a guard which had been left at the bridge. Here the British fired at the Americans across the stream, and the volley being returned, a few were killed on both sides, before the British guard retreated upon the main body, whither they were soon followed by the other detachment which was out. Smith took two hours to gather wagons for his wounded and make preparations for his retreat, which had now become imperative, for the militia were seen swarming on the hills.[370] When Smith started he threw out a flanking party on his left, which followed a ridge running parallel to his march; but when the sloping of the land compelled the flankers to descend to the level of the road, the British lost the advantage which the ridge gave them, and the minute-men, who now began to strike the British line of march at every angle, waylaid them at cross-roads, and dropped an incessant fire upon them from copse, hill, and stone wall, until the retreating troops, impeded with their wounded, and leaving many of their dying and dead, huddled along the road like sheep beset by dogs. Just on the easterly outskirts of Lexington they met Percy, whose ranks opened and received the fugitives; and Stedman, the British historian who was with Percy, tells us how the weary men hung out their tongues as they cumbered the ground during their halt. It was near two o'clock, and Percy planted his cannon to keep his assailants at bay, while his troops, now about eighteen hundred in number, rested and refreshed themselves. Before this, his baggage train, which had been delayed in crossing the bridge from Brighton to Cambridge so as to fall far behind his hastening column, had been captured, with its guard, by a crowd of old men some distance below, at Menotomy.[371] When Percy limbered his pieces and his troops fell again into column, the hovering militia renewed the assault. As pursuer and pursued crossed West Cambridge plain the action was sharp. Percy did not dare attempt to turn towards the boats which Smith had left at Lechmere Point, and any intention he may have had of halting at Cambridge and fortifying was long vanished. So he pursued the road which led towards Charlestown Neck. Several hundred militiamen, who had come up from Essex County,[372] were nearly in time at Winter Hill to cut the British off in their precipitate retreat, and "God knows", said Washington, when he learned the facts, "it could not have been more so." Percy, however, slipped by, and as darkness was coming on, the fire of the pursuers began to slacken as they approached Bunker Hill. Here, with the royal ships covering their flanks, the British halted, and, facing about, formed a line and prepared to make a stand. General Heath, who during the latter part of the day had been on the ground, drew off his militia, and at the foot of Prospect Hill held the first council of war of the now actual hostilities. Warren, early in the day hastening from Boston across the river, had galloped towards the scene of conflict. When he encountered Percy's column on its way out, he seems to have evaded it and joined General Heath, then taking cross-roads to intercept the pursuing militia. Heath took the command of the provincials soon after Percy resumed his march. From this time Warren, as chairman of the committee in Boston, kept near Heath, for counsel if need be, and Heath says that on the West Cambridge plain a musket-ball struck a pin from Warren's earlock.

No one could tell what would happen next, after this suddenly improvised army had begun to rendezvous that night in Cambridge. As the straggling parties, in bivouac and in what shelter they could find, compared experiences and counted the missing, messengers were hurrying in every direction with the tidings of the war at last begun![373]

On the 20th of April there was much to do beside picking up the dead that may have been left over night along the road from Concord. The Committee of Safety[374] were summoning all the towns to send their armed men to Cambridge.[375] Warren was writing to Gage to beg better facilities for getting the women and children, with family effects, out of Boston.[376] These were busy days for that ardent patriot. The militia were beginning to pour in, and Warren must do the chief work in reducing the mob to order. Congress comes to Watertown, and Warren, in the absence of Hancock, must preside. He bids God-speed to Samuel Adams and John Hancock[377] as they start for the Continental Congress. He hears with a sinking heart of the vessel which arrived at Gloucester on the 26th, bringing the body of Josiah Quincy, so lately warm that, when the tidings reached Cambridge of his death, Warren supposed he had lived to get ashore.[378]

HEATH'S ACCOUNT OF THE FIGHT AT MENOTOMY.

From a slip of paper in the Heath Papers, vol. i. no. 71.

After a copperplate in An Impartial Hist. of the War in America, Boston, 1784, vol. iii. The background is much the same as that of a portrait of Washington in the same work, and the print, issued in Boston, where Heath was well known, shows what kind of effigies then passed current. A portrait of Heath by H. Williams has been engraved by J. R. Smith. (Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc., p. 46.) There is extant a likeness owned by Mrs. Gardner Brewer, of Boston. Cf. Mem. Hist. of Boston, iii. 183. Heath was born in Roxbury, March 2, 1737, and died Jan. 24, 1814. His service was constant during the war, though his deeds were not brilliant. He seems conspicuously to have acquired the regard of Washington; though Bancroft calls him vain, honest, and incompetent. His papers are in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Cabinet.

Another day Warren is busy carrying out the behests of the Committee of Safety respecting their scant artillery. At another time he is encouraging wagoners to go into Boston to bring out the friends of the cause and their property; but it was not so easy to get Gage's permission, and as the tories made a plea that these Boston patriots were necessary hostages, obstacles were thrown in the way.[379] There were rumors, too, of an intention of the royal troops once more to raid upon the country. Only two days after the 19th of April, Ipswich was wild with such rumors, and the alarm spread to the New Hampshire line[380] and beyond.[381]

The patriots at Cambridge were not pleased when they found that the Connecticut assembly had sent a committee to bear a letter from Governor Trumbull (April 28) and to confer with Gage.[382] There was a feeling that the time had passed for such things, and Warren wrote (May 2) a letter beseeching the sister colony to stand by Massachusetts, which elicited from Trumbull a response sufficiently assuring.[383]

Already there was a proposition warlike enough from a Connecticut captain who had just led his company to Cambridge, and was now urging the seizure of Ticonderoga and its stores. The proposition was timely. During the previous winter the patriots had learned that the British government was intending to separate the colonies by securing the line of the Hudson.[384] Accordingly the instigator of this counter-movement was ordered, May 3d, to carry it out, and Benedict Arnold makes his first appearance in American history. Meanwhile, however, acting upon hints which Arnold had already dropped before leaving Connecticut, or perhaps anticipating such hints, some gentlemen in that colony, joining with others of Pittsfield, in Massachusetts, had gone to Bennington, where, on the day before Arnold was commissioned, they had been joined by Col. Ethan Allen. Thus the plan which Arnold had at heart was likely to be carried out before he could arrive from Cambridge. A few days later the command of the force which had gathered naturally fell to Allen as having the largest personal following, and this following was loyal enough to their leader to threaten to abandon the enterprise if Arnold, who arrived very soon, should press his rights to the command. By a sort of compromise, Allen and Arnold now shared amicably the leadership. Less than a hundred men had reached the neighborhood of the fort on the morning of May 10, when, in the early dawn, the two leaders, overpowering the sentinels at the sally-port, reached the parade-ground with their men, and forced an immediate surrender from the commandant, still in his night-clothes. Fifty men and nearly two hundred cannon, and many military stores, were thus promptly and easily secured. More than a hundred other pieces were added, when, on the 12th, Colonel Seth Warner,[385] with a coöperating detachment, seized the post at Crown Point, and shortly afterwards Bernard Romans took possession of Fort George.[386]

RUINS OF TICONDEROGA, 1818.

From a plate in the Analectic Magazine (Philadelphia, 1818). Cf. views in Lossing's Field-Book, and Harper's Monthly (vii. p. 170); Von Hellwald's America, pp. 134, 135.

On the 14th some of Arnold's belated men reached him with a captured schooner, which Arnold immediately put to use in conveying a force by which he surprised the fort at St. John's, on the Sorel, and then returned to Ticonderoga.[387]

Meanwhile the provincials had begun to use the spade in Cambridge, and here and there a breastwork appeared.[388] On the 5th of May the provincial congress pronounced Gage "an unnatural and inveterate enemy",[389] and issued a precept for a new congress to convene.

ROXBURY LINES.

Follows a contemporary pen-and-ink sketch, showing the American lines as seen from the British lines on Boston Neck. The original is in the library of Congress.

The military anxiety was increasing. Thomas had but 700 men at Roxbury, which he tried to magnify in the British eyes by marching them in and out of sight, so as to make the same men serve the appearance of many more. On the 8th of May there was an alarm that the royal troops were coming out, and the militia of the near towns were summoned.[390] To put on an air of confidence, a few days later (May 13), Putnam, from Cambridge, marched with 2,200 men into Charlestown and out again, without being molested, though part of the time within range of the enemy's guns. It was the military assertion of the idea, which the day before the Watertown congress had expressed, of governing themselves. "It is astonishing how they have duped the whole continent", wrote Gage to Dartmouth,[391] and perhaps he had not heard even then of the last victory of opinion down in Georgia, where parishes of New England descent were forcing issues with their neighbors.

The Committee of Safety now resolved to remove the live-stock from the islands in Boston Harbor; and Gage, on his part, determined on securing some hay on Grape Island, near Weymouth. These counter-forays led to fighting, and for some weeks the harbor was alive with skirmishing.[392] Meanwhile the Massachusetts congress had urged Connecticut to let Arnold bring some of the cannon captured on Lake Champlain to Cambridge,[393] and the day before the brush occurred at Grape Island they had delivered (May 20) a commission as commander-in-chief of the Massachusetts troops to Artemas Ward. In Boston the remaining loyalists were soon cheered by advices promising large reinforcements, which they now confidently began to expect,[394] and the feeling grew apace among the beleaguerers that a better organization and a closer dependence of the colonies among themselves were necessary to meet the impending dangers. Dr. Langdon, the president of Harvard College, in the election sermon[395] on the day when the new provincial congress met (May 31), had recognized the general obedience which was already paid to the advice of the Continental Congress. There were not a few who remembered how, twenty years before, the young Virginian, Colonel George Washington, had come to Boston, and who recalled the good impression he had made. They had heard lately of the active interest and sympathy with the patriots' cause which he was manifesting among his neighbors in that colony. On the 4th of May, Elbridge Gerry, with the approval of Warren, wrote to the Massachusetts delegates at Philadelphia, that they would "rejoice to see this way the beloved Colonel Washington" as generalissimo.[396] This was the feeling, while the army which lay about Boston was a mere inchoate mass, far from equal to the task which they had undertaken; but brave words did much; brave spirits did more; and John Adams was writing from Philadelphia that one "would burst to see whole companies of armed Quakers in that city, in uniforms, going through the manual."[397] The tories in Boston looked on with mingled fear and confidence. "We are daily threatened", wrote Chief-justice Oliver from Boston (June 10), "with an attack by fire-rafts, whale-boats, and what not."[398]

WARREN'S LAST NOTE.

The original is among the Heath Papers (Mass. Hist. Soc.), and is given in fac-simile in Frothingham's Warren, p. 506; and reduced (as above) in G. A. Coolidge's Brochure of Bunker Hill, p. 34.

One of the new British generals now lent his literary skill to his commanding general, for Burgoyne was a playwright and had an easy way of vaporing, which was quite apparent in Gage's proclamation of June 12,[399] to warn the rebellious and infatuated multitudes, and to hold out forgiveness to all but Samuel Adams and John Hancock.[400] The provincial congress, through Warren, prepared a counter-manifesto, but events were rushing too speedily to leave time for its publication. On the very day of issuing his proclamation Gage wrote to Dartmouth that he was intending to attack the rebels, "which every day becomes more necessary."[401]

NOTICE TO THE MILITIA.

After an original in the volume of Proclamations in the library of the Mass. Hist. Society.

On the 14th Warren was made the second major-general of the Massachusetts forces, and his active spirit gave encouragement, since the inalertness of Ward was creating much concern. Early in the morning of the 17th Warren left Watertown, and the provincial congress convened without him, but they knew the emergency. A broadside exists of this day, in which they call upon the neighboring militia to hold themselves in readiness. In the anxious hours of this, St. Botolph's day,[402] with all eyes on Boston, the Continental Congress had chosen Washington to be their military chief,[403] and had adopted the forces which were about to show that Boston was not besieged idly. It took time then for Cambridge to know what was happening in Philadelphia; but the assembled legislators at Watertown might well hope for what had really happened, when, as the fateful day wore on, messengers arrived, declaring that the Continental funds were to be used to help supply this beggared army, and that all the aspirations of its provincial congress to set up a civil government of their own had met the approval of the continent.[404]

Now to look at the military situation. Already John Thomas, a physician of Kingston, had been made second in command under Ward; and Richard Gridley, an old Louisbourg artilleryman, had been made chief engineer. As yet the New England colonies were the only ones which had sent their armed men to the scene. The Massachusetts men had taken post mostly at Cambridge, near the college; and here, as the days went on, came also a Connecticut regiment under Israel Putnam, who had left his plough in its furrow. So, as June began, there had assembled on this side of Boston between seven and eight thousand men, eager, but poorly equipped, and with a small supply of powder. On the Roxbury side, fronting the British lines on Boston Neck, there were about four thousand Massachusetts men, under John Thomas, supported by a camp a little farther out, at Jamaica Plain, to which Joseph Spencer had come with another Connecticut regiment, and Nathanael Greene, with a body of Rhode Islanders. Thomas had some field-pieces and a few heavy cannon, and his force constituted the army's right wing. Its left wing was upon the Mystick at Medford, and near Charlestown Neck, and here were the New Hampshire men, and among their officers the old Indian fighter, John Stark, was conspicuous. Three companies of Massachusetts men constituted the extreme left at Chelsea. So, as the summer came on, perhaps about 16,000 men in all were encamped as a fragile army besieging Boston. General Ward exercised by sufferance a superior authority over all, though as yet no colony but New Hampshire had instructed its troops to yield him obedience. As Massachusetts claimed three quarters of the entire force thus drawn together, the assumption of chief command by her first officer was natural enough in a common cause.

The force which this sixteen thousand loosely organized men dared to hold imprisoned in Boston was a well-compacted army of somewhere from five to ten thousand men, for it is difficult amid conflicting reports to determine confidently a fixed number. On the 25th of May Gage had been joined by a reinforcement, accompanied by three other general officers,—Burgoyne, Clinton, and Howe.

The council of war at Cambridge was meanwhile directing new works to be constructed, strengthening and stretching their lines of circumvallation. Its opinions were divided on the question of occupying so exposed a position as the most prominent eminence on the peninsula of Charlestown, the defence of which might bring on a general engagement, which their stock of powder could not support. On the 13th of June the American commanders had secretly learned that Gage intended on the 18th to take possession of Dorchester Heights, the present South Boston. There was but one counter-move to make, and that was to seize in anticipation the summit of the ridgy height which began at Charlestown Neck and extended, in varying outline, to the seaward end of the peninsula,—an eminence known as Bunker Hill. On the 16th of June, a council of war, held in the house near Cambridge common, known then as the Hastings and later as the Holmes House,[405] decided, upon the recommendation of the Committee of Safety, to occupy Bunker Hill at once.

ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE OF SAFETY.

This has before appeared in G. A. Coolidge's Brochure of Bunker Hill, 1875.

That evening about 1,200 men, of whom 200 were from Connecticut under Thomas Knowlton, the whole being under the command of Colonel William Prescott, first listened to a prayer of the president of the college, and then marched, with their intrenching tools, in the darkness, to Charlestown Neck.

Here the purpose was for the first time disclosed to the men. They resumed their march, going up the slope of the hill before them, while Nutting's company and a few Connecticut men were sent along the shore opposite Boston, to patrol it. The highest summit of the hill was the one first reached; but, after a consultation, it was decided to proceed to a lower one, more nearly before Boston. Here Richard Gridley marked out a redoubt, and at midnight the men took their spades and began to throw up the breastworks. Putnam, who seems to have accompanied Prescott, now returned to Cambridge, and while the men worked busily, Prescott sent an additional patrol to the river, and twice went down himself, to be satisfied, as he heard the "All's well" of the watch on the men-of-war moored opposite, that no noise of the intrenching tools had reached the enemy. Soon after the first glimmer of dawn on the 17th, the sailors on the ships discovered the embankments, now about six feet high, when one of the vessels, the "Lively", at once opened fire upon them. This lasted only till Admiral Graves could send orders to cease, but was shortly renewed from the ships and from the batteries on Copp's Hill, in Boston, as soon as the British generals comprehended the situation. Prescott's men meanwhile kept at their work. One man was soon killed by a cannon-ball. The commander and others walked the parapet, encouraging their men, and Willard, one of the councillors who stood by Gage as they surveyed the hill through their glasses, recognized the Pepperell colonel, and told the British general what sort of man he had got to encounter. A promise had been given to Prescott that in the morning a relief and refreshments would be sent from Cambridge; but nothing came to the hungry men, as they still worked. Ward, who heard the firing, yielded to Putnam's persuasion to send reinforcement, only so far as to despatch a part of Stark's regiment, for he feared that Gage would seem to prepare to assault in Charlestown, while his intention might be to attack in Cambridge. Finally, about ten o'clock, Major John Brooks[406] reached headquarters with a request from Prescott for help and food. Richard Devens pressed Ward to comply, and at eleven the rest of the New Hampshire men were ordered to march.

Meanwhile, as the tide rose, some floating batteries were sent up the stream to take the works in flank, and later, to rake the Neck. A few stray shots were returned from a single field-piece in the redoubt, one of whose balls passed over Burgoyne's head, as he tells us, while he was watching at Copp's Hill. Putnam came again from Cambridge, and induced Prescott to send off a large number of his men with the intrenching tools, and under Putnam's direction this detail soon began to use them in throwing up earthworks on the higher summit in the rear,—labor wasted, as it turned out.

As the day wore on, Gage held a council of war, and it was determined not to land troops at the Neck and attack in rear, as Clinton urged, but to assault in front. This decision was long the ground of severe criticism upon Gage, and ruined his military reputation. The ships were put into better positions, and redoubled their fire. By noon the British troops in Boston were marching to the wharves, where they embarked in boats, and, under the command of General Howe, they rowed to Moulton's or Morton's Point, where the landing was quickly made.[407] Howe drew up his men on the rising ground which makes the least of the three heights of the peninsula, and anticipating sharp work, sent back the boats for more men.

Prescott observed all this from the hill, but looked longingly up the peninsula for his own reinforcements. A few wagons came, not with men, but with beer, though nothing adequate even of this. The feeling began to spread among the men on the hill that they had been treacherously left to their fate; but they got encouragement from a few brave souls who came straggling in from Cambridge. Pomeroy, the French war veteran, was one. James Otis, wreck as he was, came.[408] So did Warren, whose presence the men recognized by a cheer, and, major-general as he was, he came to fight under Colonel Prescott. Putnam, too, had again returned, and was seen riding about the field in a restless way, with a word of encouragement here and there, and pointing out to a few reinforcements now arriving where best to go.

Prescott's eye, observing Howe's dispositions, saw he was aiming to advance along the Mystick and take the redoubt in reverse. So Knowlton, with two field-pieces and the Connecticut troops, were sent down the hill towards the Mystick, where they began to make a line of defence of a low stone wall, which was topped by a two-rail fence. Stark and Reed, with the New Hampshire regiments, diminished somewhat by details which Putnam had taken from them to help the work in the trenches on the higher hill, soon came up and ranged their men in a line with Knowlton. There was, however, an interval between this part of the field and the breastwork and redoubt, which offered a chance for the enemy to intervene and break the line. An attempt was made to prepare for such a contingency by grouping the few guns which they had at this point. New troops, in small numbers, continued to come up, and they were placed in position as best they could be to keep the line strong in all parts as it sloped away from the crowning redoubt towards either river.

It was nearing three o'clock when the British boats returned from Boston; and when their troops landed Howe had about 3,000 men in array. He pushed his guns forward and got them in position to play upon the American field-pieces, and soon drove them away, while at the same time some skirmishing took place on the British flanks, whose main body was now advancing in a measured step in two columns: one led by Howe against the rail-fence, the other by Pigot against the redoubt. The assault was become one of infantry only, for the British guns were soon mired in some soft ground, and the balls in reserve had proved of an over-calibre.[409] Pigot's front got near the redoubt before the Americans poured in their fire, which was deadly enough to send the staggered column wildly back. At the same time, along the Mystick Howe's advance was met by the American field-pieces, some of which had been drawn to the rail-fence. Their musketry fire was reserved, as at the redoubt, and when it belched upon the deployed enemy it produced the same effect. So there was a recoil all along the British line. In the respite before they advanced again, Putnam tried to rally some troops in the rear, and to get others across the Neck, which the raking fire of the British vessels was now keeping pretty clear of passers.[410] But there was not time to do much, for Howe was soon again advancing, his artillery helping him more this time; and to add to the terror of the scene, he had sent word to Boston to set Charlestown on fire by shells, and the conflagration had now begun.[411] The smoke did not conceal the British advance,[412] and Prescott and Stark kept their men quiet till the enemy were near enough to make every shot tell. The result was as during the first attack. The royal troops struggled bravely; but all along the line they wavered, and then retreated more precipitately than before.

There was a longer interval before Howe again advanced, and Prescott used it in making such a disposition of his men as would be best in a hand-to-hand fight, for neither adequate reinforcements nor supplies had reached him, and his powder was nearly gone. There was a good deal of confusion and uncertainty in the rear, all along the road to Cambridge. Ward had ordered a plenty of troops forward, but few reached the peninsula at all, or in any shape for service. Putnam did what he could to bring order out of confusion; but his restless and brandishing method, and his eagerness to finish the works on Bunker Hill, were not conducive to such results as a quiet energy best produces. The brave men at the front must still do the work left for them, with such chance assistance as came.

Howe was rallying his men for a third assault. Major Small had landed 400 marines, to make up in part for the losses. Clinton had seen how confused the troops were as he looked across the river with his glass, and had hurried over from Boston to render Howe help as a volunteer aid. The British general determined now to concentrate his attack upon the works on the crown of the hill, making only a demonstration against the rail-fence. He brought his artillery to bear in a way that scoured the breastwork which flanked the redoubt, and then he attacked. His column reserved their fire and relied on the bayonet. They met the American fire bravely, but soon perceived that it slackened; and surmising that the American powder was failing, they took new courage. Those of the defenders who had ammunition mowed down the assailants as they mounted the breastworks, Major Pitcairn among them;[413] but as soon as Prescott saw the defence was hopeless, he ordered a retreat, and friend and foe mingled together as they surged out of the sally-port amid the clouds of dust which the trampling raised, for a scorching sun had baked the new-turned soil. It was now, while the confused mass of beings rocked along down the rear slope of the hill, that Warren fell, shot through the head. No one among the Americans knew certainly that he was dead, as they left him. The British stopped to form and deliver fire, and there was thus time for a gap to open between the pursuers and the pursued. The New Hampshire men and others at the rail-fence, seeing that the redoubt was lost, tenaciously faced the enemy long enough to prevent Prescott's men from being cut off, and then stubbornly fell back. Some fresh troops which had come up endeavored to check the British as they reached the slope which led to the intrenchments that Putnam had been so solicitous about; but the British wave had now acquired an impulse which carried it bravely up the hill; and Putnam, skirring about, was not able to make anybody stand to defend the unfinished works. So down the westerly slope of the higher summit to the Neck the provincials fled, and the British followed. The vessels poured in their fire anew as the huddled runaways crossed the low land, and not till they got beyond the Neck was there any effectual movement by fresh troops to cover the retreat. General Howe fired a few cannon shot after them, as he mustered his forces on the hill. It was now about five o'clock. There was time in the long summer's day to advance upon Cambridge, but Howe rejected Clinton's advice to that end, and began, with other troops which had been sent to him from Boston, to throw up breastworks on the inland crown of Bunker Hill. Thus spading for their defence, the British passed the night, while the Americans lay on their arms on Winter and Prospect hills, or straggled back to Cambridge. There was no disposition on either side to renew the fight.

Prescott did not conceal his indignation at not having been better supported, when he made his report at Ward's headquarters. He knew he had fought well; but neither he nor his contemporaries understood at the time how a physical defeat might be a moral victory. Not knowing this, there was little else than mortification over the result,—indeed, on both sides. A wild daring had brought the battle on, and something like bravado had led the British general into a foolhardy direct assault, while more skilful plans, availing of their ships, might have accomplished more without the heavy loss which they had endured.[414] The British folly was increased by the way in which they allowed the provincials to make the first great fight of the war a political force throughout the continent.

TRYON'S SEAL AND AUTOGRAPH.

From a plate in Valentine's N. Y. City Manual, 1851, p. 420.

The general opinion seems to be that the Americans had about 1,500 men engaged at one time, and that from three to four thousand at different times took some part in it.[415] The British had probably about the same numbers in all, but were in excess of the Americans at all times while engaged.[416] The conflict with small arms lasted about ninety minutes.

On the morning of the 18th of June (Sunday) the British renewed the cannonading along their lines, as if to cover some movement, but nothing came of it, and each side used the shovel busily on the intrenchments. A shower in the afternoon stopped the firing.

There was a dilemma in New York a few days later. Governor Tryon, who had been in England, was already in the harbor ready to land on his return, and Washington was approaching through Jersey on his way to Boston. It was determined by the city authorities to address and extend courtesies to both. The American general chanced to be ahead, and got the parade and fair words first. Tryon disembarked a few hours later, and received the same tributes.[417]

It was Sunday, June 25, when Washington reached New York. He found the town excited over the recent battle, the news of which he had met a few hours out of Philadelphia.[418]

WASHINGTON'S HEADS OF LETTER, JULY 10, 1775.

This is about half of the whole as given in fac-simile in Wilkinson's Memoirs, i. p. 855. The original is now among the Reed-Washington letters in the Carter-Brown library. It was the basis of Washington's first formal official letter to the president of Congress, which, as written out by Joseph Reed, is given in Sparks' Washington, iii. p. 17. It shows the degree of attention which the general bestowed on his minutes for his secretary's use.

Washington, on his first arrival, had taken temporary quarters in the house of the president of the college, known now as the Wadsworth house (Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 107; Gay's Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 408), till the finest house in the town, one of a succession of mansions on the road to Watertown, was made ready for his use. These houses, which had all been deserted by their Tory owners, gave the name of Tory Row to this part of Cambridge. The one assigned to Washington's use was a Vassall house, later, however, known as the Craigie house, when it became the property of Andrew Craigie, from whose family it passed to the ownership of Longfellow, who died in it. Sparks lived in it when he edited Washington's Writings. It is familiar in engravings. Cf. Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. p. 113, with a note on various views of it; and for its associations, see Samuel Longfellow's Life of H. W. Longfellow; Irving's Washington, ii. p. 11; Greene's Hist. View of the Amer. Rev., p. 220; Manhattan Mag., i. 119; Mrs. Lamb's Homes of America; Gay's Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 415. Among the other buildings of Revolutionary associations still standing in Cambridge are the Brattle house, the headquarters of Mifflin; the Vassall house, where Dr. Church was confined; the house where Jonathan Sewall lived, later occupied by General Riedesel; the Oliver house, now owned by James Russell Lowell; the "Bishop's Palace", where Burgoyne was quartered; and Christ Church, where Washington attended service (view in Mass. Mag., 1792, and compare Nicholas Hoppin's discourses, Nov. 22, 1857, and Oct. 15, 1861). For more of the historical associations of these Cambridge sites, see the Harvard Book; Drake's Landmarks of Middlesex; the Cambridge Centennial Memorial (1875); William J. Stillman's Poetic Localities of Cambridge (Boston, 1876); T.C. Amory's Old and New Cambridge; an illustrated paper in Harper's Monthly, Jan., 1876, another by Alexander Mackenzie, in the Atlantic Monthly, July, 1875; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., June, 1858, and Sept., 1872; and the book edited by Arthur Gilman, Theatrum Majorum, The Cambridge of 1776, which has an eclectic diary (by Mary W. Greely) of the siege, purporting to be that of one Dorothy Dudley.

Among the letters now passing through New York was one upon that battle, addressed to the President of Congress, which Washington took the liberty of opening for his own guidance. After instructing Schuyler, who was to be left in charge of the forces in New York, to keep watch upon Tryon[419] and Guy Johnson,[420] Washington the next day (26th) started for Cambridge. On the 2d of July Washington reached Watertown, and on the 3d, under a tree still standing,[421] he took command of the army, which thus passed, in effect, under Continental control, numbering at the time nearly 15,000 men fit for duty.[422] To brigade this army, rectify the circumvallating lines, watch the constant skirmishes, and assign the new bodies of troops arriving to places in the works, was the labor to which Washington devoted himself at once. On the 9th of July he held his first council of war,[423] and on the 10th he addressed his first letter to Congress, describing the condition of the siege as he had found it.

To guard against surprise, and replenish the magazines, required constant diligence, and the supply of powder never ceased to be a cause of anxiety in the one camp, while the diminishing stock of provisions produced almost as much concern in Boston. The beleaguered British, however, got some relief from the exodus of the Boston people, which the stress of want forced the royal commander to permit.[424] So the summer was made up of anxious moments. The independent husbandmen of New England made but intractable raw recruits, and Washington, who had expected to find discipline equal to that which the social distinctions of the South gave to the masses there, was disappointed, and did not wholly conceal his disgust.[425] He grew, however, to discern that campaigns could produce that discipline as well, if not better, than a life of civil subservience. Recruits came in from the South, and when some of the Northern officers saw the kind of men that Morgan and others brought as riflemen from Virginia, their comment was scarcely less austere. "The army would be as well off without them", said Thomas, who, next to Washington, was the best disciplinarian in the camp. Of the generals, Lee was, however, by much the most conspicuous. There was a glamour about the current rumors of his soldierly experience that obscured what might have been told of his questionable character.[426] His eccentricities were the camp talk, and rather served to magnify his presence, while it proved dangerous to perambulate the lines with him and his crowd of dogs, since the exhibition tempted the enemy to drop their shells in that spot.[427] Early in July a trumpeter approached the American lines bringing a letter from General Burgoyne to General Lee, and the camp straightway proceeded to invest the strange general with political importance. Burgoyne and Lee were old campaigners together, and Lee, before he left Philadelphia, had written a stirring letter to the British general on the bad prospects of the ministerial policy. The letter which now came was a reply, and proposed a conference on Boston Neck, to which Congress advised Lee not to accede, and the momentary ripple subsided.[428]

In August there was some correspondence with Gage respecting the treatment of prisoners, in which Washington appears to the better advantage.[429] The correspondence of the American general during the summer constantly dwells upon the scarcity of powder, though for prudence' sake he veils his expressions as much as he can. His own troops and even Congress had no conception of his want, and while Washington hardly dared fire a salute because of the powder it would take, Richard Henry Lee, from Philadelphia, was urging him to plant batteries at the mouth of Boston harbor, and keep the enemy's vessels from coming in and going out.[430] Governor Cooke, of Rhode Island, who was doing his best to get powder from Bermuda, was compelled to keep the secret too. Apparently Washington did not let his brigade commanders know the whole truth.[431] Under these circumstances Washington had no courage to attack, and Gage, on his part, was content to keep his men from deserting as best he could.

During September the threatening manœuvres of the British cruisers along the Connecticut coast[432] kept Governor Trumbull from sending what powder he had, and there was little hope, when Washington called a council of war on the 11th, that anything would come of it. There had been just then some internal manifestations not very reassuring.[433] A letter which Dr. Benjamin Church had tried to get to the British in Newport harbor had been intercepted, and its cypher interpreted. There was no expressed defection made clear by it, but suspicions were aroused, and Church, being arrested, was summoned before the congress at Watertown, where he made a speech protesting his innocence, but scarcely quieting the suspicions. He was put under control, and removed from the neighborhood of the army.[434]

There was scarce less gratification in the camp at Cambridge in getting rid of their doubtful associate than was experienced in Boston in getting a release from their sluggish general. The ministry had saved that soldier's pride as much as they could in desiring to have him nearer at hand for counsel;[435] and the sympathetic loyalists whom he had befriended paid him their compliments in an address. Gage finally, on October 10, issued his last order, turning over the command to Howe.[436]

In the middle of October, the burning of Falmouth, the modern Portland, in Maine, seemed to make it clear that the war was to be conducted ruthlessly on the British part. Captain Mowatt, with a small fleet, had entered the harbor and set the town on fire, and to those who communicated with him it was said that he announced his doings to be but the beginning of a course of such outrages. When the news reached Washington, he dispatched Sullivan to Portsmouth, with orders to resist as far as he could any similar demonstration there.[437] What a modern British historian[438] has called a "wanton and cruel deed" seems to have been but the hasty misjudgment of an inferior officer, without orders to warrant the act, and the ministry promptly disowned the responsibility.[439] During October, also, a committee of Congress,[440] visiting Washington's camp, could see for themselves the troubles of their heroic commander. They had not yet heard in Philadelphia the roar of hostile guns,—a sensation they might now experience. They could share Washington's perplexities as the new enlistments halted upon the expiration of the old,[441] and perhaps join in some of his kindly merriment when Phillis Wheatley, the negress, addressed his Excellency in no very bad verses.[442]

HANDBILL.[443]

FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, No. 1. (Looking towards Dorchester Heights.)

Note.—This and the three companion sketches are drawn from a panoramic view in colors, now in the Cabinet of the Mass. Hist. Soc., of which a much reduced heliotype is given in the Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 80. This view is a copy by Lieutenant Woodd of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, from the original by Lieutenant Williams, of the same regiment, which is preserved in the King's Library (Brit. Museum). Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., iv. 397, 424; Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 80.

The foreground on the left is the summit of Beacon Hill, not far from the spot where the State House now stands, though at a level considerably higher than the present one. Two of the guns now standing on Cambridge Common were taken from the dock in Boston after the British evacuated it, and they resemble the cannon here sketched, and one of them may possibly be that identical gun. The spire at the left would seem to be that of the First Church, which stood on the present Washington Street nearly opposite the head of State Street. (Cf. view of it in Memorial History of Boston, ii. 219.) The spire next to the right must have been that of the Old South Church. That on the extreme right would seem to be the steeple of the New South (Church Green) in Summer Street, now disappeared.

FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, No. 2. (Looking towards Roxbury.)

In No. 2 the Hancock House is in the foreground. The earliest sketch of this house is a very small one, making part of the Price-Faneuil View of Boston (1743), and its presence in which and other data led to the suspicion that this 1743 view was from an old plate, which had been originally cut twenty years earlier, and this was subsequently proven. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 68; xxi. 249. The earliest enlarged view of the house is in the Mass. Mag., 1789. Cf. Mem. Hist. Bost., iii. 202. An oil painting, belonging to Mrs. F. E. Bacon, is on deposit in the halls of the Bostonian Society, where, also, are some interior views of the house.

The British encampments on Boston Common are indicated in the foreground at the left. The parallel lines (8) show the neck connecting Boston with Roxbury. The meeting-house (10) on the distant land is that of the First Religious Parish in Roxbury, on the site now occupied by the church near the Norfolk Home. The American fort just beyond (at 11) was on a rocky summit, where now the stand-pipe of the Cochituate Water Works is placed.

FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, No. 3. (Looking towards Brookline and the outlet of Charles River.)

No. 3 shows in the foreground the most westerly of the three summits of Beacon Hill (Louisbourg Square—though much lower, the hill having been cut down—represents its present site), and the rope walks. There is a similar water-color drawing among the Peter Force maps and views in the library of Congress.

The inward curve of the nearer shore on the right of the picture represents the area now including Cambridge Street and the territory north of it, below Blossom Street, covering the approaches to the bridge now leading to Cambridge, the oldest parts of which near the College are shown at 16; while at 17 we have the American encampments at Prospect Hill, the modern Somerville. The American works between the College and Charles River seem to be intended by 15. The mouth of the river is seemingly indicated by the point of land just below the number 14, which apparently stands for the Brookline fort and its connections, in the modern Longwood. Between the man in the foreground and the somewhat abrupt eminence beyond him, was a depression in the outline of the ridge, not far from the head of the present Anderson Street.

FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, No. 4. (Looking towards Charlestown.)

No. 4 has the Old West Church in the foreground, where Jonathan Mayhew preached. Its spire was subsequently taken down by the British to prevent its use as a signal station for the friends of the provincials. It stood till 1806, when the present edifice was built. (Drake's Landmarks, 374.)

This picture is substantially duplicated on another page, in the Rawdon view, sketched during the continuance of the battle of Bunker Hill. The Mount Pisca (Pisgah) at 19 the present Prospect Hill in Somerville. The lines of Winter Hill and Ploughed Hill would be in the direction of 20. At 27 is a glimpse of the Mystick River seen beyond Charlestown Neck, the armed British transport at 16 commanding the road over that neck. At 22 are the new works of the British, begun after the battle of Bunker Hill, and shown in the contemporary plan of the Charlestown peninsula, given on another page, while the British encampment is on the inner slope of the hill, at 23. Below, and along the shore (24, 24), are indicated the ruins of Charlestown, while the figures 25 mark the position of the redoubt which was defended by Colonel Prescott and his men. The house on the hither shore, below the transport, marks nearly the spot where the present bridge to East Cambridge begins. In the foreground on the extreme right are somewhat vague indications of the dam inclosing the mill-pond, in which the present Haymarket Square occupies a central position.

Perhaps they may have had the grim satisfaction of riding to distant parts of the lines in Thomas Hutchinson's coach, kept now for the general's use, if we may believe the refugee himself.[444]

A little later, Josiah Quincy, who from his house at Braintree could look out upon the harbor, had been urging Washington to block the channel, and thus imprison the British ships there at anchor, and prevent the coming of others. Washington appreciated the motives of that ardent patriot, but he would have liked better the cannon and powder that would have rendered the plan feasible.[445] At all events, the possible chances of the plan made not a very pleasant prospect for Howe, who had already set his mind—as, indeed, the ministry had already advised[446]—upon evacuating the town; but his ships were as yet not sufficient for the task, and hardly sufficient to protect his supply-boats from the improvised navy which Washington had been for some time commissioning.[447]

John Adams, in Philadelphia, was getting uneasy over the apparent inaction of Washington, and wrote in November (1775) to Mercy Warren that Mrs. Washington was going to Cambridge,[448] and he hoped she might prove to have ambition enough for her husband's glory to give occasion to the Lord to have mercy on the souls of Howe and Burgoyne![449]

The left wing of the beleaguering army was now pushed forward and occupied Cobble Hill, the site of the present McLean Asylum, and the two armies watched each other at closer quarters than before, the almost foolhardy Americans feeling increased confidence when the fortunate captain of an ordnance brig gave them a supply of munitions. In December, Massachusetts and New Hampshire[450] promptly supplied the loss of Connecticut and Rhode Island troops, who were not to be induced to prolong their enlistments. Washington was cheered with this alacrity of a portion, at least, of the New England yeomen, and he suffered as many as he could of those who had come hastily to the camp in the spring to go home on brief furloughs to make winter provision for their families. Before the year was out, Congress had authorized Washington to destroy Boston if he found it necessary. The British general was, on his part, organizing in that town a Royal Regiment of Highland Emigrants,[451] and other loyalist battalions, putting Ruggles, Forrest, and Gorham in command of them.[452]

On the first of January, 1776, the federal flag, with its thirteen stripes and British Union,[453] was first raised over the American camp, and their council of war was inspirited to determine upon an attack, as soon as the chances of success seemed favorable; but the prudent ones trusted rather to Howe's evacuating through his straits for provisions, and held back from the final decision. It was not forgotten that 2,000 men were still without firelocks, and there was not much powder in the magazines. The total environing army scarce numbered ten thousand men fit for duty, and they were stretched out in a long circumvallation, while the enemy could mass at least half that number on any one point, and had a fleet to sustain them. Howe had not shown a much more active spirit than Gage had displayed, and there was a feeling in the British camp that he was too timid for the task,[454] and there could not have been much hopefulness in seeing so much better a general as Clinton sent off in January with several regiments, to join other forces and a fleet on the coast of North Carolina.[455] Washington meanwhile kept up a show of activity, and when, on the evening of January 8, he sent Knowlton on a marauding scout into Charlestown, there was a little flutter of excitement in Boston for fear it foreboded more serious work, and the British officers were hastily summoned to their posts from the play-house, where they were diverting themselves,[456]—the play on this particular occasion being something they had planned, and called The Boston Blockade.

As early as the middle of June, 1775, General Wooster, with some Connecticut troops, had by invitation of Congress marched to the neighborhood of New York, to be prepared for any demonstration from British ships which might attempt to land troops, for the British naval power was and continued to be supreme in the harbor till Washington occupied the city.

Note.—This broadside, and the opposite one, are given in fac-similes from copies in the Massachusetts Historical Society's library, and they pertain to theatrical performances given by the British officers in Boston during the siege.

Before Clinton had left Boston, Washington, under Lee's urgency, had decided to possess New York, and the plan, which was submitted to John Adams, as representing the Congress, met with that gentleman's approval.[457] Lee was accordingly sent into Connecticut to organize such a force as he could for advancing on that city.[458] He kept Washington informed of his success in these preliminaries, and finally reached New York himself on February 4,[459] and here he remained till it was ascertained that Clinton was proceeding to the South, where he was instructed to follow that general and confront him as best he could, as we shall presently see.[460]

The chief event of February, 1776, was the arrival of the cannon captured at Ticonderoga, and the placing them in the siege batteries along the American lines, for Washington had dispatched Knox to bring these much needed cannon to him. John Adams records meeting them on their way at Framingham, January 25;[461] and when the train of fifty pieces and other munitions reached the lines, there was something less of anxiety than there had been before.[462] The army, however, was still deficient in small arms, and Washington wrote urgently to the New York authorities for assistance of that kind.[463]

By the first of March powder had been obtained in considerable quantities, and Washington opened a bombardment from all parts of his lines, which was deemed necessary to conceal a projected movement. During the night of March 4-5, General Thomas, from the Roxbury lines,[464] with 2,500 men, took possession of Dorchester Heights.[465] It was moonlight, but the men worked on without discovery, and by morning had thrown up a cover. Both armies now laid plans for battle.

BOSTON.

After a photograph of a view in the British Museum. Cf. similar views in Moore's Diary of the Amer. Rev., i. 97; Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. p. 156; Lossing's Field-Book; Grant's British Battles, ii. 138. The house in the left foreground is the house built by Governor Shirley. It is still standing, but much changed. See a view of it in the frontispiece of Mem. Hist. Boston, vol. ii.

There is a view of the town and harbor in the Pennsylvania Mag., June, 1773; and others of a later date are in the Columbian Mag., Dec., 1787; Mass. Mag., June, 1791. Cf. Winsor's Readers' Handbook of the Amer. Rev., p. 66, for other views and descriptions.

BOSTON CASTLE.

After a photograph of a view in the British Museum.

Howe determined to attack the Heights by a front and flank assault. Washington reinforced Thomas, and planned at the same time to move on Boston by boats across the back bay. The British dropped down on transports to the Castle, but a long storm delayed the projected movement. This so effectually gave the Americans time to increase their defences that the British general saw that to evacuate the town was the least of all likely evils. As he began to show signs of such a movement, the Americans began to speculate upon their significance. Heath, at least, was fearful that the appearances were only a cloak to cover an intention to land suddenly somewhere between Cambridge and Squantum.[466] But the genuineness of Howe's intention gradually became apparent, as, indeed, evacuation with him was a necessity, while Admiral Shuldam also saw that his fleet, too, was immediately imperilled from the newly raised works on Dorchester Heights. So Howe had scarce an alternative but to give a tacit consent to a plan of the selectmen of Boston for him to leave the town uninjured, if his troops were suffered to embark undisturbed. Washington entered upon no formal agreement to that end, but acquiesced silently as Howe had done.[467] There was still some cannonading as Washington pushed his batteries nearer Boston on the Dorchester side, at Nook's Hill, teaching Howe the necessity of increased expedition. By early light on the 17th of March it was discovered that Howe had begun to embark his troops, and by nine o'clock the last boat had pushed off, completing a roll, including seamen, fit for duty, of about 11,000 men, with about a thousand refugees.[468] The Continentals were alert, and their advanced guards promptly entered the British works on the several sides. The enemy's ships fell down the harbor unmolested; but that night they blew up Castle William, and the vessels gathered together in Nantasket Roads. Here they remained for ten days, causing Washington not a little anxiety; and he wrote to Quincy, at Braintree, to have all the roads from the landings patrolled, lest the British should send spies into the country.[469] On the 27th, all but a few armed vessels, intended to warn off belated succor,[470] had disappeared in the direction of Halifax.[471]

Ward was left with five regiments to hold the town and its neighborhood,[472] while Colonel Gridley, "whom I have been taught to view", said Washington, "as one of the greatest engineers of the age", was directed to fortify the sea approaches.[473]

OCCUPATION OF BOSTON.

After an original in the collection of Proclamations in the library of the Mass. Hist. Society. Cf. Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. p. 181; Sparks's Washington, iii. 322; Niles's Principles and Acts (1876), p. 127. Curwen records, when the proclamation reached London, that its prohibition of plunder "was a source of comfort."

Washington gradually moved his remaining army to New York, not without apprehension at one time that he would have to direct them to Rhode Island, for a fog had befooled some people in Newport into sending him a message that the British fleet was in the offing there. He left Cambridge himself April 4th, not for Virginia, as some good people imagined he would do, out of loyalty to his province,[474] but to defend as he could the line of the Hudson, of which signs were already accumulating that it was the game for each side to secure. A few of the enemy's ships still hung about Nantasket Roads, and some desultory fighting occurred in the harbor.[475] The British, however, failed to prevent some important captures of munition vessels being made. It was not till June that General Lincoln, with a militia force, brought guns to bear upon the still lingering enemy, when they sailed away, and Boston was at last free of a hostile force.

It is now necessary to follow two other movements, which had been begun while the siege of Boston was in progress, the one to the north, and the other to the south.

The exploits of Allen and Arnold at Ticonderoga, already related, had invited further conquests; but the Continental Congress hesitated to take any steps which might seem to carry war across the line till the Canadians had the opportunity of casting in their lot with their neighbors. On the 1st of June, 1775, Congress had distinctly avowed this purpose of restraint; and they well needed to be cautious, for the Canadian French had not forgotten the bitter aspersions on their religion which Congress had, with little compunction, launched upon its professors, under the irritation of the Quebec Act. Still their rulers were aliens, and the traditional hatred of centuries between races is not easily kept in abeyance. Ethan Allen was more eager to avail himself of this than Congress was to have him; but the march of events converted the legislators, and the opportunity which Allen grieved to see lost was not so easily regained when Congress at last authorized the northern invasion. Arnold and Allen had each aimed to secure the command of such an expedition, the one by appealing to the Continental Congress, the other by representations to that of New York. Allen had also gone in person to Philadelphia, and he and his Green Mountain Boys were not without influence upon Congress, in their quaint and somewhat rough ways, as their exuberant patriotism later made the New York authorities forget their riotous opposition to the policy which that province had been endeavoring to enforce in the New Hampshire Grants. Connecticut had already sent forward troops to Ticonderoga to hold that post till Congress should decide upon some definite action; and at the end of June, 1775, orders reached Schuyler which he might readily interpret as authorizing him, if the Canadians did not object, to advance upon Canada.[476] He soon started to assume command, but speedily found matters unpromising. The Johnsons were arming the Indians up the Mohawk and beyond in a way that boded no good, and they had entered into compacts with the British commanders in Canada. Arnold had been at Ticonderoga, and had quarrelled with Hinman, the commander of the Connecticut troops. Schuyler heard much of the Green Mountain Boys, but he only knew them as the lawless people of the Grants, and soon learned that Allen and Warner had themselves set to quarrelling. Presently, however, Allen reported at Ticonderoga for special service, as he had been cast off by his own people. Another volunteer, Major John Brown, was sent by Schuyler into Canada for information. Schuyler's position was a trying one. He had few troops of his own province. The Connecticut troops were too lax in discipline to suit his ideas of military propriety, and his temperament had little to induce him to make concessions to the exigencies of the conditions.[477] With the best heart he could, he tried to organize his force for an advance, and assisted, in Indian conferences at Albany, to disarm, as far as he might, the Mohawks of their hostility.

In August the news from Canada began to be alarming. Richard Montgomery, an Irish officer who had some years before left the army to settle on the Hudson and marry, was now one of the new brigadiers. He urged Schuyler to advance and anticipate the movement now said to be intended by Carleton, the English general commanding in Canada. At this juncture Schuyler got word from Washington that a coöperating expedition would be dispatched by way of the Kennebec, which, if everything went well, might unite with Schuyler's before Quebec.

Montgomery had already started from Ticonderoga, and it was not till the foot of Lake Champlain had been reached that Schuyler overtook him, and, with an effective force of about 1,000 men, he now prepared, on the 6th of September, to advance upon St. Johns. The demonstration caused a little bloodshed, but, getting information which deceived him, he fell back to the Isle-aux-Noix, and prepared to hold it against a counter attack, and to prevent any vessel of the enemy penetrating to the lake. The outlook for a while was not auspicious. Malaria made sad inroads among the men, and of those who were left on duty, insubordination and lack of discipline, and perhaps a shade of treachery, impaired their efficiency. Schuyler was prostrate on his bed, and Montgomery was forced to unmilitary expedients because of the temper of his troops. Schuyler's disorder seeming to have permanently mastered him, he resigned the command to Montgomery and returned up the lake. He had, at least, the satisfaction of meeting reinforcements pushing down to the main body. Before these arrived Montgomery had begun the siege of St. Johns, and he was pressing it, when Ethan Allen, whom Montgomery was expecting to join him, met with Brown, and these two planned an attack on Montreal. It was attempted, but Brown and his men failed to coöperate, and Allen and those he had with him were finally captured.[478] When the Canadians heard that the redoubtable Green Mountain leader was in irons on board an English vessel bound for Halifax,[479] a great deal was done towards awakening them from that spell of neutrality upon which the American campaign so much depended for success.

So Montgomery continued to keep his lines about St. Johns with great discouragement. He met every embarrassment which a hastily improvised and undisciplined mass of men could impose upon a man who was of high spirit and knew what soldierly discipline ought to be. A gleam of hope at last came. He detached a party to attack Fort Chamblée, further down the Sorel, and it succeeded (October 18), and he was thus enabled to replenish his store of ammunition, which was by this time running low.[480] So Montgomery was enabled to press the siege of St. Johns with renewed vigor. When Wooster, the veteran Connecticut general, joined him with the troops of that colony, there was some apprehension that the younger Montgomery might find it difficult to maintain his higher rank against the rather too independent spirit of the old fighter.[481] No disturbance, however, occurred, and both worked seemingly in union of spirit. Every effort of Carleton to relieve the British commander at St. Johns failing, that officer surrendered the post, and, on November 3d, Montgomery took possession.

We may turn now to the expedition that Washington had promised to dispatch from Cambridge, and which had been thought of as early as May. Benedict Arnold had hurried from Crown Point to lay his grievances before the commander-in-chief. It seemed to Washington worth while to assuage his passions and to profit by his dashing valor, for he had by this time become convinced that Howe had no intention of venturing beyond his lines. So Arnold was commissioned Colonel, and given command of the new expedition, and the satisfied leader saw gathering about him various quick spirits, better recognized later. Such was Morgan, who led some Virginia riflemen, and Aaron Burr, who sprang to the occasion as a volunteer.[482] Washington provided Arnold with explicit instructions, and with an address to circulate among the Canadians.[483] About eleven hundred men proceeded from Cambridge to Newburyport, whence, by vessel and bateaux, they reached Fort Western (Augusta, Maine), towards the end of September. Here the expeditionary force plunged into the wilderness, up the Kennebec, environed with perils and the burdens of labor. Suffering and nerving against vexations and weariness that grew worse as they went on, they saw the sick and disheartened fall out, and found their rear companies deserting for want of food.[484] Those that were steadfast were forced to eat moccasins and anything. On they struggled to the ridge of land which marked the summit of the water-shed between the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence. Then began the descent of the Chaudière, perilous amid the rush of its waters, which overturned their boats, and sent much of what stores they had left on a headlong drive down the stream. At last the open country was reached, and Arnold stopped to refresh the survivors. He dispatched Burr to see if he could find Montgomery,[485] and, making the most of the friendly assistance of the neighboring inhabitants, Arnold advanced to Point Levi, and began to make preparations for crossing the St. Lawrence. The city of Quebec looked across the basin in amazement on a stout little army, of whose coming, however, they had had an intimation; while Arnold's men were hard at work making or finding canoes and scaling-ladders.

Meanwhile where was Montgomery, whom Burr, disguised as a priest, and speaking French or Latin as required, was seeking up the river? He had got possession of Montreal without a blow, and sending Colonel Easton down to the mouth of the Sorel, that officer intercepted the little flotilla with which Carleton was trying to reach Quebec, and captured all of the fugitives except Carleton himself, who escaped in a disguise by night. The news of Arnold, which Burr at last brought to Montgomery, made that general more anxious than ever to push on to Quebec, but the expiration of the enlistments of some of his men much perplexed him, and he was obliged to make many promises to hold his army together. Before Montgomery could reach him, Arnold had in the night taken about 550 men across the river, and ascending at Wolfe's Cove, he had paraded them before the walls and demanded a surrender. The garrison was small, and in part doubtful, and the inhabitants were more than doubtful, but the lieutenant-governor, Cramahé, with his stanchest troops, the Royal Scotch, overawed the rest, and kept the gates closed. The vaporing Arnold had been known in the past within the town as a horse-jockey, and his promise as a general, with his shivering crowd, did not greatly impress those whom he had somewhat farcically beleaguered. In a day or two Arnold became frightened and drew off his men, strengthened now a little by others who had crossed the river. Unmolested he went up the river, to keep within reach of Montgomery, perceiving as he went up the banks the succor for Quebec which Carleton, having picked up men here and there, was bringing down by water.

From the Political Mag., iii. 351. Cf. Jones's Campaign for the Conquest of Canada, p. 112; Mag. of Amer. Hist., June, 1883, p. 409; Moore's Diary of the Revolution, p. 454; B. Sulte's Hist. des Canadiens français (as Lord Dorchester, to which rank Carleton was subsequently raised).

By the 1st of December, Montgomery, with three armed schooners and only 300 men, reached Arnold at Point-aux-Trembles. The united forces now turned their faces towards Quebec, less than a thousand in all, with a body of two hundred Canadians, under Colonel James Livingston, acting in conjunction; and on the 5th were before the town. Carleton haughtily scorned all advances of Montgomery to communicate with him, and devoted himself to overawing the town, quite content that the rigors of winter should alone attack the invaders. While the Americans were making some show of planting siege-batteries, plans for assault were in reality maturing, and a stormy night was awaited to carry them out. It came on the night before the last day of the year. While two feints were to be made on the upper plain, the main assaults were to be along the banks of the St. Charles and the St. Lawrence, from opposite sides, with a view to joining and gaining the upper town from the lower. Montgomery led the attack beneath Cape Diamond on the St. Lawrence side, and while in advance with a small vanguard, and unsuspecting that his approach was discovered, he was opened upon with grape, and fell, with others about him.[486] His death was the end of the assault on that side. Arnold was at first successful in carrying the barriers opposed to him, but was soon severely wounded and taken to the rear. Morgan, who succeeded to the command, was pressing their advantage, when Carleton, relieved by Montgomery's failure, and by the discovery that the other attacks meant nothing, sent out a force, which so hemmed Morgan in, that, having already learned of Montgomery's failure, he found it prudent to surrender with the few hundred men still clinging to him. The Americans elsewhere in the field hastily withdrew to their camp, and Carleton was too suspicious of the townspeople to dare to take any further advantage of his success.

The command of the Americans now devolved on Lieutenant-Colonel Donald Campbell, who sent an express to Wooster at Montreal, urging him to come and take the control. That general thought it more prudent to hold Montreal as a base,[487] and remained where he was, while he forwarded the dismal news to his superior, Schuyler, at Albany, who had quite enough on his hands to overawe Sir John Johnson and the Tories up the Mohawk. The succession of Wooster to the command in Canada boded no good to the New York general, and led to such crimination and recrimination between the two that Congress, towards spring (1776), took steps to relieve Schuyler of the general charge of the campaign. Thomas, who had rendered himself conspicuous in driving the British from Boston, was made a major-general (March 6), and was ordered to take the active command in Canada. A New England general for troops in the main from those colonies seemed desirable, and Thomas was certainly the best of those furnished by Massachusetts during the early days of the war.

Meanwhile Arnold, amid the snows, was audaciously seeming to keep up the siege of Quebec in his little camp, three miles from the town. Small-pox was beginning to make inroads on his little army, scarce at some periods exceeding five hundred effective men. Wooster finally came from Montreal on the first of April, and assumed command. For the influence intended to soothe and gain the Canadians to pass from the courtly Montgomery to the rigid and puritanical Wooster was a great loss, and it soon became manifest in the growing hostility of the people of the neighboring country. It was by such a pitiful force that Carleton allowed himself to be shut up in Quebec for five months.

This was the condition of affairs when a commission, consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll, was sent by Congress, with delegated powers, to act with prompter decision on the spot.[488] They reached Albany early in April, and found Thomas, from Boston, already there. So the two generals, Schuyler and Thomas, pushed on ahead of the commissioners, and, with the reinforcements now setting towards Canada, before and behind them, it seemed as if a new vigor might be exerted upon the so far disastrous Northern campaign. Thomas directed his course to Quebec, while the commissioners went to Montreal, where they found the most gloomy apprehensions existing, and were soon convinced that, without hard money and troops, Canada must be relinquished. Franklin returned to Philadelphia to impress this upon Congress, while Schuyler was at his wits' ends to find men, provisions, and money to send forward, till Congress should act.

Washington, by this time in New York with the troops which had forced the evacuation of Boston, yielded to the orders of Congress, and sent Sullivan of New Hampshire with a brigade, carrying money and provisions, to reinforce the wretched army in Canada, thereby diminishing, with great risk, his own force to less than 5,000 men. Thomas had at this time reached Quebec (May 1), where he found, out of the 1,900 men constituting the beleaguering army, only about a thousand not in hospital, and scarcely five hundred of these were effective troops. It was necessary to do something at once, for the breaking ice told the American general that a passage was preparing for a British fleet, which was known to be below. Plans for an assault on the town miscarried, and while Thomas was beginning to remove his sick preparatory to a retreat, three British men-of-war appeared in the basin. They landed troops, and gave Carleton an opportunity to hang upon the rear of the retreating invaders, and pick up prisoners and cannon. He did not pursue them far.[489]

Near the same time a force of British and Tories, coming down the river from Ontario, had fallen upon Arnold's outpost at Cedar Rapids, above Montreal, and had captured its garrison. Thus disaster struck both ends of the American line of occupation. The force under Thomas was withdrawing to the Sorel, when Burgoyne, with large reinforcements, landed at Quebec. Up the Sorel the Americans retreated, joined now by the troops under Thompson, which Washington had earlier sent from New York. Thomas[490] soon died (June 2) of small-pox at Chamblée; and Wooster being recalled, Sullivan, who now met the army, took the command, and pushing forward to the mouth of the Sorel, prepared to make a stand. He soon sent a force under Thompson towards Three Rivers, to oppose the approaching British, now reaching 13,000 in number, either at Quebec or advancing from it,—a number to confront, of which apparently Sullivan had no conception. This general himself possessed hardly more than 2,500 men, for Arnold, instead of reinforcing him, as directed, had left Montreal for Chamblée. The action at Three Rivers, of which the cannonading had been heard at the Sorel, proved a disastrous defeat. It was followed by the British vessels pushing up the river, and as soon as they came in sight Sullivan broke camp and also retreated to Chamblée, followed languidly by Burgoyne. Here Sullivan joined Arnold, and the united fugitives, of whom a large part were weakened by inoculation, continued the retreat to the Isle-aux-Noix, thence on to Crown Point, where early in July the poor fragmentary army found a little rest,—five thousand in all, and of these at least one half were in hospital.[491]

DUNMORE'S SEAL.

From a plate in Valentine's N. Y. City Manual, 1851.

We may glance now at the progress of events to the southward. In Virginia, Dunmore, the royal governor, hearing of Gage's proclamation proscribing Hancock and Adams, feared that he might be seized as a hostage, and took safety on board a man-of-war in Yorktown harbor. Events soon moved rapidly in that quarter.[492] Patrick Henry, perhaps a little unadvisedly, was made commander of their militia.[493] In due time, from his floating capitol, Dunmore issued his proclamation granting freedom to slaves of rebels,[494] and had directed a motley crew of his adherents to destroy the colonial stores at Suffolk, and this led to a brisk engagement at the Great Bridge (December 9, 1775), not far from Norfolk, in which the royalists were totally defeated.[495] The destruction of that town, now under the guns of the royal vessels, soon followed, on the first of January, 1776.[496]

On the 27th of February, 1776, the Scotch settlers of North Carolina, instigated by Martin, the royal governor, and under the lead of their chief, Macdonald,[497] endeavored to scatter a force of militia at Moore's Creek Bridge, but were brought to bay, and compelled to surrender about half of a force which had numbered fifteen or sixteen hundred.[498]

Early in 1776 the task was assigned to Clinton, who had in January departed from Boston, as we have seen, to force and hold the Southern colonies to their allegiance, and Cornwallis, with troops, was sent over under convoy of Sir Peter Parker's fleet, to give Clinton the army he needed. The fleet did not reach North Carolina till May. In March, Lee, while in New York, had wished to be ordered to the command in Canada, as "he was the only general officer on the continent who could speak and think in French." He was disappointed, and ordered farther south.[499] By May he was in Virginia, ridding the country of Tories, and trying to find out where Parker intended to land.[500] It was expected that Clinton would return north to New York in season to operate with Howe, when he opened the campaign there in the early summer, as that general expected to do, and the interval for a diversion farther south was not long. Lee had now gone as far as Charleston (S. C.), and taken command in that neighborhood, while in charge of the little fort at the entrance of the harbor was William Moultrie, upon whom Lee was inculcating the necessity of a slow and sure fire,[501] in case it should prove that Parker's destination, as it might well be, was to get a foothold in the Southern provinces, and break up the commerce which fed the rebellion through that harbor.

FORT MOULTRIE, 1776.

Reduced from the plan in Johnson's Traditions and Reminiscences of the Amer. Revolution in the South (Charleston, S. C., 1851). It shows that the rear portion of the fort had not been finished when the attack took place. The same plate has an enlarged plan of the fort only. See the maps in Drayton's Memoirs of the Amer. Rev. in the South (Charleston, 1821, two vols.), ii. 290, which is similar to Johnson's Ramsay's Rev. in S. Carolina, i. 144, which is of less area; and that in Gordon's Amer. Revolution, iii. 358. These are the maps of American origin. Lossing (ii. 754) follows Johnson.

The people of Charleston had been for some time engaged on their defences, and "seem to wish a trial of their mettle", wrote a looker-on.[502] The fort in question was built of palmetto logs, and was unfinished on the land side. Its defenders had four days' warning, and the neighboring militia were summoned. On the 4th of June the hostile fleet appeared,[503] and having landed troops on an adjacent island, it was not till the 27th that their dispositions were made for an attack.

ATTACK ON CHARLESTON, 1776.

From Political Mag. (London, 1780), vol. i. p. 171,—somewhat reduced. Carrington notes (p. 176), as dated Aug. 31, 1776, and belonging to the North Amer. Pilot: "An exact plan of Charleston and harbor, from an actual survey, with the attack of Fort Sullivan on the 26th June, 1776, by his Majesty's squadron, commanded by Sir Peter Parker." Cf. no. 37 of the American Atlas (Faden's), and the Amer. Military Pocket Atlas, 1776, no. 5. Mr. Courtenay, in the Charleston Year Book, 1883 (p. 414), gives a folded fac-simile of a broadside map, A plan of the Attack on Fort Sullivan ... with the disposition of the King's land forces, and the encampments and entrenchments of the rebels, from the drawings made on the spot. Engraved by Wm. Faden, by whom it was published Aug. 10, 1776. The dedication to Com. Parker is signed by Lieut.-Col. Thomas James, royal regiment of artillery, June 30, 1776. It has a corner plan of the "Platform in Sullivan's Fort", by James, on a larger scale. Appended to the map are a list of the attacking ships, and extracts from Parker's and Clinton's despatches. The channel between Long and Sullivan's islands is given as seven feet in the deepest part. The original MS. of this Faden map is in the Faden Collection in the library of Congress (no. 41), where is also a MS. map of Charleston and its harbor, a topographical drawing, finished in colors (no. 40). Cf. Plan de la Barre et du hâvre de Charlestown d'après un plan anglois levé en 1776. Rédigé au dépôt général de la marine [Paris], 1778. (Brit. Mus. Maps, 1885, col. 764.)

These are the different English maps. In the same Charleston Year Book, p. 478, is an account of the successive forts on the same spot. A view of Charleston is in the London Mag. (1762, p. 296), and one by Thomas Leitch, engraved by S. Smith, 1776, is noted in the Brit. Mus. Map Catal., 1885, col. 764.

Their ships threw shot at the fort all day, which did very little damage, while the return fire was rendered with a precision surprising in untried artillerists, and seriously damaged the fleet,[504] of which one ship was grounded and abandoned.

WILLIAM MOULTRIE.

From the copperplate in his Memoirs of American Revolution, on far as it related to States of N. and S. Carolina and Georgia. Compiled from most authentic materials, the author's personal knowledge of various events, and including an Epistolary Correspondence on Public Affairs, with Civil and Military Officers, at that period. (New York, 1802, two volumes.) The likeness in the National Portrait Gallery (New York, 1834) is Scriven's engraving of Trumbull's picture.

There is a portrait in the cabinet of the Penna. Hist. Soc., no. 58. See the paper on General Moultrie in South Carolina in Appleton's Journal, xix. 503, and Wilmot G. Desaussure's Address on Maj.-Gen. William Moultrie, before the Cincinnati Society of South Carolina, 1885.

The expected land attack from Clinton's troops, already ashore on Long Island, was not made. A strong wind had raised the waters of the channel between that island and Sullivan's Island so high that it could not be forded, and suitable boats for the passage were not at hand.[505] A few days later the shattered vessels and the troops left the neighborhood, and Colonel Moultrie had leisure to count the costs of his victory, which was twelve killed and twice as many wounded. The courage of Sergeant Jasper, in replacing on the bastion a flag which had been shot away, became at once a household anecdote.[506]

[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]

THE earliest attempt with any precision to enumerate the various sources of information upon the whole series of military events about Boston during 1775 and 1776 was by Richard Frothingham, in the notes of his Siege of Boston (1849), where, in an appendix, he groups together the principal authorities. Later than this, Barry (Massachusetts, iii. ch. 1), Dawson (Battles, vol. i.), and others had been full in footnotes; but the next systematized list of sources was printed by Justin Winsor in 1875, in the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library. This last enumeration was somewhat extended in the Bunker Hill Memorial, published by the city of Boston,[507] and still more so by the same writer in his Handbook of the American Revolution, Boston, 1879. It is condensed in the Memorial Hist. of Boston, iii. 117.

Salem, because of a little alleged pricking of bayonets when Leslie's expedition was harassed there in February, 1775, has sometimes claimed to have witnessed the first shedding of blood in the war. The principal monograph on the subject is C. M. Endicott's Account of Leslie's retreat at the North Bridge in Salem, on Sunday, Feb. 26, 1775 (Salem, 1856).[508] Early resistance to British arms, and even bloodshed in the act, had undoubtedly occurred before the affair at Lexington, and writers have cited the mob at Golden Hill,[509] in New York, and the massacre at Westminster, in the New Hampshire Grants, when an armed body of settlers arose against the authority of the king, as asserted in favor of the jurisdiction of New York in March, 1775.[510]

The precipitation of warfare, however, can only be connected with the expedition to Lexington and Concord. Every stage of the affair has been invested with interest by discussion and illustration. The ride of Paul Revere to give warning has grown to be a household tale in the spirited verse of Longfellow; but, as is the case with almost all of that poet's treatments of historical episodes, he has paid little attention to exactness of fact, and has wildly, and often without poetic necessity, turned the channels of events. In literary treatment, the events of Lexington and Concord form so distinct a group of references that they can be best considered in a later note (A), as can also the sources of information respecting the fight at Bunker Hill (B).

Of the siege of Boston, the chief monograph is Frothingham's, already referred to. Other contributions of a monographic nature are the address and chronicle of the siege by Dr. George E. Ellis in the Evacuation Memorial of the City of Boston (1876); W. W. Wheildon's Siege and Evacuation of Boston and Charlestown (Boston, 1876, pp. 64); and the chapters on the siege in Dawson's Battles of the United States, vol. i., and Carrington's Battles of the Revolution (1876).[511]

Among the general historians, Bancroft has made an elaborate study of the siege, devoting to it a large part of his vol. viii. (orig. edition), and all the histories of the United States, Massachusetts, and Boston necessarily cover it.[512]

The principal of the later British historians is Mahon, in his Hist. of England, vol. vi. Lecky (England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. ch. 12), while he goes little into details, gives an admirable account of the two respective camps. The Life of Burgoyne, by Fonblanque, is the fullest of the biographies of the actors on the British side.

On the American side, the lives of leading officers all necessarily yield to those of Washington,[513] whose letters, as contained in vol. iii. of Sparks's ed. of his Writings, can well be supplemented by those of Reed, then his secretary.[514] Of the contemporary general historians, Gordon and Mercy Warren were familiar with the actors of the time. The Journals of the Continental Congress and of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts follow the development of events, and show how in some ways the legislation shaped them.[515] Contemporary records and comments are garnered in Almon's Remembrancer, Force's Archives, Niles's Principles and Acts of the Revolution, and Moore's Diary of the Amer. Revolution. The life and daily routine of both camps are to be traced in abundant orderly books, diaries, and correspondence, of which the register is given in the notes (C and D) following this essay.

Of the Canada expedition, in its combined movements by the Kennebec and Lake Champlain, the authorities for detail may well be reserved for later notes (G and H), but for comprehensive treatment references may be made to the general historians and a few special monographs. As respects the campaign in general, the only considerable special study is Charles Henry Jones's History of the Campaign for the Conquest of Canada in 1776 (Philad., 1882). The book does not profess, however, to follow the movements before the death of Montgomery, nor to touch at all the coöperating column of Arnold before it had united with the other. A principal interest of its writer is, furthermore, to chronicle the share of Pennsylvanians in the campaign. The study is therefore but an imperfect one, and the author gives the student no assistance in indicating his sources. The reader most necessarily have recourse, then, for a survey of the whole campaign, to such general works as Bancroft's United States (vol. viii.), Carrington's Battles (p. 122), and other comprehensive and biographical works.[516]

The political aspects of the movement on Canada arise in the main from the mission of the Commissioners of Congress to the army, and their efforts to affect the sympathies of the Canadians. The sources of this matter are also traced in a subsequent note.[517]

[NOTES.]

A. Lexington and Concord.—The details of Revere's connection with the events of the 18th and 19th April are not altogether without dispute. Revere's own narrative was not written till 1798,[518] and was printed in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, vol. v., but not so accurately as to preclude the advisability of reprinting it in the same society's Proceedings, Nov., 1878. Richard Devens's nearly contemporary account of the signal lanterns is printed in Frothingham's Siege of Boston, p. 57.[519] The traditional story of the other messenger of that eventful night is told in H. W. Holland's William Dawes and his ride with Paul Revere.[520]

In a book which was published at Boston in 1873 as Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex, but whose title in a second edition, in 1876, reads Old Landmarks and Historic Fields of Middlesex, Mr. Samuel Adams Drake follows (ch. xvi.-xviii.) the route of the British troops from Lechmere Point to Concord and back to Charlestown, pointing out the localities of signal events in the day's course.

The provincial congress ordered depositions[521] to be taken of those who had participated in the events of the day, with a main purpose of establishing that the British fired first at Lexington. These were signed in several copies. One set of them, accompanied by a request from Warren to Franklin to have them printed and dispersed in England, was entrusted to Capt. John Derby, of Salem, who took also a copy of the Essex Gazette, in which an account of the fighting was printed, and sailed in a swift packet for England four days after Lieutenant Nunn, bearing Gage's despatches, had sailed from Boston (April 24). Derby reached Southampton on the 27th of May, and was in London the next day.[522] London had been stirred three weeks before with rumors of a bloody day with Gage's troops,[523] and now two days later the government felt called upon to announce they had no tidings; whereupon Arthur Lee, who, since Franklin had sailed for America, had succeeded to his place as agent of Massachusetts, and had received the papers, made a counter-announcement that the public could see the affidavits at the Mansion House.[524] The tidings spread. Hutchinson communicated the news to Gibbon, and he recorded it in a letter, May 31.[525] On the 5th of June Horace Walpole wrote it to Horace Mann. On the 7th, Dartmouth spoke of the "vague and uncertain accounts of a skirmish, made up for the purpose of conveying misrepresentation."[526]

LEXINGTON DEPOSITION.

Fac-simile of the original in the Arthur Lee Papers in Harvard College library. The fac-simile on the opposite page, relating to the action at Concord, is reproduced from an original in the same collection of papers.

On the same day the friends of America, forming the Constitutional Society, met at the King's Arms in Cornhill, and raised a subscription of £100, to be paid to the widows and families of the provincials who had been killed.[527] On the 8th another vessel reached Liverpool, confirming the news, but giving no particulars. Finally, on the 10th, the official report of Gage, with the statements of Percy and Smith, reached the government.[528]

Meanwhile, both sides at home had been busy with circulating their pleas of vindications. The provincial congress at once despatched messengers south,[529] and the Rev. William Gordon, an Englishman settled in Jamaica Plain, drew up (May 17, 1775) for the patriots their authoritative Account of the Commencement of hostilities;[530] and various other contemporary accounts on the provincial side have come down to us,[531] and of importance among them are the narratives of the ministers of Lexington and Concord, the Reverends Jonas Clark and William Emerson.[532]

LEXINGTON, 1775.

After a plan in Hudson's Lexington, p. 173. The British approached from Boston up the road, past the Munroe Tavern, still standing (C), past Loring's house and barn (I J); and opposite Emerson's house (H) they sighted, looking beyond the meeting-house (L), the Lexington militia, under Capt. John Parker, drawn up along the farther side of the triangular green, in front of the houses of Daniel Harrington (E) and Jonathan Harrington (D, still standing) (who was one of the killed), which were separated from each other by a blacksmith's shop (G). The house on the opposite side of the common (F) was Nathan Munroe's (still standing), and on the third side was Bucknam's Tavern (B, still standing), where Parker's company was mostly assembled when the order was given to form on the common. When the minute-men scattered, most of them ran across the swamp; but some fled up the Bedford road, in the direction of the Clarke House (A), still standing, where Adams and Hancock had spent the night, but from which they were now hurrying towards Burlington for better protection.

On the return of the British from Concord, they met Percy's column on the road between Munroe's Tavern and Loring's. Percy now kept the provincials at bay by planting his field-pieces at M and N, while some of the wounded were carried into the tavern, which is still standing. The buildings (I J) were set on fire and burned down. Balls from Percy's cannon have been dug up since in the town. One went through the meeting-house (L). Several of these balls are preserved. While Percy was halting, General Heath arrived among the provincials and assumed the command. Cf. the plans in Josiah Adams's Address at Acton; Moore's Ballad History of the Revolution.

There are views of the Clarke House in Hudson's Lexington, 430; Drake's Landmarks of Middlesex, 364-368; Lossing's Field-Book, i. 523; and of the Munroe Tavern in Hudson, part ii. p. 161.

The Memoirs of General Heath are, of course, of first importance; for he was on the ground soon after Percy took the command on the British side.[533]

CONCORD, 1775.

This follows a plan in Hudson's Lexington, p. 191. The British approached from Lexington by the road (1), and halted in the middle of the town (3). The provincials, who were assembled by the liberty-pole (2), retired along the road (5) by the Rev. William Emerson's house [Hawthorne's "Old Manse">[, and across the North Bridge (between 5 and 8) to the high land (6), where they halted, and where reinforcements from the neighboring towns reached them. Colonel Smith, the British commander, now sent out two parties to seek for stores. One, which went by the road (4) to the South Bridge, found little. The other followed the road (5) by the North Bridge, and passing beneath the provincials at 6, turned to their right, and took the road (5) to Colonel Barrett's house, where they destroyed some cannon and other stores. This second party had left a detail at the North Bridge to secure their retreat by that way, for the road (10) did not then exist. The provincials, after the party bound to Colonel Barrett's passed on, descended from 6 to the North Bridge, when the detail defending it, who were near 8, recrossed the bridge. Here the first firing took place, and some were killed on both sides, the river being between the combatants. The British detail now retired towards the centre of the town, the Americans following them across the bridge, but immediately dispersing without military order. While thus scattered, the British party, returning from Barrett's house, recrossed the North Bridge without molestation, and rejoined the main body at the centre of the town. Here the British, after destroying other stores and delaying for about two hours, formed for the return march towards Lexington, the main body following the road (2), while a flanking party took the ridge of high land (2).

Cf. also the plans in Frothingham's Siege of Boston, 70.

A few days after the 19th, John Adams tells us[534] he rode along "the scene of action toward Lexington for many miles, and inquired of the inhabitants the circumstances." He gives us no particulars, but what he learned was not calculated to diminish his ardor in the cause.[535]

The accounts on the British side are almost equally numerous, including the official reports of Gage, Percy, and Smith, already referred to. General Gage sent (April 29)[536] to Gov. Trumbull, of Connecticut, a statement, which was printed at the time in a handbill as a Circumstantial Account, and he refers to it "as taken from gentlemen of indisputable honor and veracity, who were eye-witnesses of all the transactions of that day."[537]

In 1779 there was printed at Boston a pamphlet containing General Gage's instructions to Brown and De Bernière,[538] from a MS. left in Boston by a British officer, to which is appended an account of the "transactions" of April 19, with a list of the killed, wounded, and missing,[539] and in 1775 there was printed at London a contemporary summary in The Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Dispute.[540]

The question of firing the first shot at Lexington was studiously examined at the time, each side claiming exemption from the charge of being the aggressor, and Frothingham[541] and Hudson[542] collate the evidence. It seems probable that the British fired first, though by design or accident a musket on the provincial side flashed in the pan before the regulars fired.[543] That some irregular return of the British fire was made seems undeniable, though at the time of the semi-centennial celebration certain writers, anxious to establish for Concord the credit of first forcibly resisting the British arms, denied that claim on the part of the neighboring town. The controversy resulted in Elias Phinney's Battle of Lexington, published in 1825,[544] with depositions of survivors, taken in 1822; and Ezra Ripley's Fight at Concord, published in 1827.[545] The parts borne by the men of other towns have had their special commemorations.[546]

PART OF EMERSON'S RECORD IN HIS DIARY, APRIL 19, 1775 (from Whitney's Literature of the Nineteenth of April).

PERCY.

From Andrews's Hist. of the War, Lond., 1785, vol. ii. A portrait engraved by V. Green is noted in J. C. Smith's Brit. Mezzotint Portraits, ii. 576. Cf. also Evelyns in America, 304; Memorial Hist. of Boston, iii. 57, 58; "Percy family and Alnwick Castle" in Jewitt's Stately Homes of England. In the Third Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission there are (1872) various papers of the Percy family touching the American war. Some of these papers have been procured from England by the Rev. E. G. Porter, of Lexington. Several letters of Percy, addressed to Bishop Percy, sold not long since at a sale of the Bishop's MSS., were bought by a London dealer, and are now in the Boston Public Library. They are quoted from in this and other chapters. On July 30, 1776, a picture of Percy was placed in Guildhall, London, by the magistrates of the city and liberties of Westminster, in token of his services in America. Cf. also Doyle's Official Baronage, ii. 670.

PERCY.

From Murray's Impartial Hist. of the present War, i. 382.

B. Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775.—There are four sufficient authorities for tracing all that is known respecting the battle of Bunker Hill, even to minute particulars, especially with respect to the testimony of those who, from nearness to the event, or from opportunity, are best entitled to be considered in the matter. The earliest master of the literature and records of the fight was Richard Frothingham, who through life was identified with the story of Bunker Hill, and who has on the whole, in his Siege of Boston and in his Life of Joseph Warren, given us the amplest details.[547] His latest gleanings were included in The Battlefield of Bunker hill: with a relation of the action by William Prescott, and illustrative documents. A paper communicated to the Massachusetts Historical Society, June 10, 1875, with additions. (Boston: printed for the author. 1876. 46 pp.)[548]

In June, 1868, Henry B. Dawson, in a special number of the Historical Magazine, entered into an elaborate collation of nearly all that had been published up to that time, making his references in footnotes, which serve as a bibliography of the subject.[549]

LEXINGTON GREEN.

From the Massachusetts Magazine (Boston, 1794). Four views (12 X 18 inches, on copper) of different aspects of the day's fight were drawn by Earl, a portrait painter, and engraved by Amos Doolittle shortly afterward. They are reproduced in the centennial edition of Jonas Clark's Narrative; in Frank Moore's Ballad History; in Potter's American Monthly, April, 1875; in Antique views of y^e Town of Boston; and separately, with an explanatory text, by E. G. Porter, as Four Drawings of the Engagement at Lexington and Concord (Boston, 1883). The view of the attack on Lexington Green was drawn from Daniel Harrington's house (see plan), and was reduced by Doolittle himself for Barber's History of New Haven. (W. S. Baker's Amer. Engravers, Philad., 1875, p. 45.) It has also been redrawn several times by others. See Lossing's Field-Book, i. 421, 524; Hudson's Lexington, p. 183; the Centennial edition of Phinney, etc.

Earl and Doolittle were soldiers of a New Haven company, which reached Cambridge a few days after the fight.

There is a view of Concord taken in 1776 in the Massachusetts Mag., July, 1794, which is reproduced in Whitney's Literature of the Nineteenth of April.

There is an early but fanciful picture of the "Journée de Lexington" in François Godefroy's Recueil d'Estampes representant les different événemens de la guerre qui a procuré l'indépendence aux États Unis de l'Amérique.

An account of Jonathan Harrington, the last survivor of the fight, is in Potter's Amer. Monthly, April, 1875, and in Jones's New York during the Revolution, i. 552.

In fiction, mention need only be made of Cooper's Lionel Lincoln, and Hawthorne's Septimus Felton.

In 1875 there was an exhibition of relics of the fight at Lexington, and some of them are still retained in the library hall. A printed list of them was issued in 1875. A musket taken from a British soldier was bequeathed by Theodore Parker to the State of Massachusetts, and now hangs in the Senate Chamber. Cf. Hist. Mag., iv. 202 (July, 1880).

In 1875 Justin Winsor published first in the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library a bibliographical commentary on all printed matter respecting the battle, grouping his notes by their affinities; and this was enlarged in the Celebration of the Centennial Anniversary of the Battle, published by the city of Boston in 1875; and still further augmented in a section of his Handbook of the American Revolution (Boston, 1879).

In 1880 James F. Hunnewell, in his Bibliography of Charlestown and Bunker Hill (Boston), grouped everything alphabetically under such main headings as monographs, maps and plans, contemporary newspapers, American statements, British accounts, French accounts, anniversaries. His enumeration is more nearly exhaustive than Mr. Winsor's, though this may still supplement it in some particulars.

The earliest printed accounts which we have of the battle are in the newspapers, and of these a full enumeration is given by Mr. Hunnewell.[550]

What may be called the official statements on the American side were speedily placed before the public, but, strange to say, neither of the two officers who have been held to have directed the conduct of the Americans vouched for any of the early accounts. From Putnam we have nothing. Prescott made no statement, which has come down to us, earlier than in a letter addressed to John Adams, Aug. 25, 1775,[551] though he is said to have assisted the Rev.

RICHARD FROTHINGHAM.

After a steel plate kindly furnished by Mr. Frothingham's son, Mr. Thomas Goddard Frothingham. There is a memoir of Mr. Frothingham, by Charles Deane, in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, Feb., 1885, and separately. Mr. Frothingham was born Jan. 31, 1812, and died Jan. 29, 1880. Remarks made to the society at the time of his death are in the Proc. (Feb., 1880), xvii. 329. Cf. R. C. Winthrop's Speeches (1878, etc.), p. 125.

Peter Thacher in a narrative which was prepared within a fortnight, Thacher himself having observed the fight from the Malden side of Mystick River.[552] This Thacher MS. was made the basis of the account which the Committee of Safety, by order of the provincial congress, prepared for sending to England.[553] There have been preserved a large number of letters and statements written by eye-witnesses or by those near at hand, some of them conveying particulars essential to the understanding of the day's events, but most adding little beyond increasing our perceptions of the feelings of the hour.[554]

After the painting belonging to Yale College. Cf. photograph in Kingsley's Yale College, i. 102; engravings in Hollister's Connecticut, i. 234, and Amer. Quart. Reg., viii. 31, 193; and memoir in Sparks's Amer. Biog., xvi. 3, by J. L. Kingsley.

To these may be added various diaries and orderly-books, which are of little distinctive value.[555] There are other accounts, written at a later period, in which personal recollections are assisted by study of the recitals of others, and chief among them are the narrative in Thacher's Military Journal (Boston, 1823), where the account is entered as of July, 1775, and chapter xix. of General James Wilkinson's Memoirs (1816), embodying what he learned in going over the field in March, 1776, with Stark and Reed. Col. John Trumbull saw the smoke of the fight from the Roxbury lines, and gave an outline narrative in his Autobiography (1841).[556] The account in General Heath's Memoirs (Boston, 1798) is short.[557] A few of the earlier general histories of the war were written by those on the American side who had some advantages by reason of friendly or other relations with the actors.[558] Of the still later accounts, Frothingham and Dawson have already been referred to for their bibliographical accompaniments. The diversity of evidence[559] respecting almost all cardinal points of the battle's history has necessarily entailed more or less of the controversial spirit in all who have written upon it, but for thoroughness of research and a fair discrimination combined, the labors of Frothingham must be conceded to be foremost. Dawson is elaborate, and he reveals more than Frothingham the processes of his collations, but his spirit is not so tempered by discretion, and an air of flippant controversy often pervades his narrative. Of the more recent general historians it is only necessary to mention Bancroft[560] and Carrington. The former gave to it three chapters in his original edition, in 1858, which, by a little condensation, make a single one in his final revision, but without material change.[561] The account in Carrington[562] is intended to be distinctively a military criticism.[563]

The troops of Connecticut[564] and New Hampshire[565] were the only ones engaged beside those of Massachusetts.

The question of who commanded during the day has been the subject of continued controversy, arising from the too large claims of partisans. Though there is much conflict of contemporary evidence, it seems well established that Col. William Prescott commanded at the redoubt, and no one questioned his right. He also sent out the party which in the beginning protected his flank towards the Mystick; but when Stark, with his New Hampshire men, came up to strengthen that party, his authority seems to have been generally recognized, and he held the rail fence there as long as he could to cover the retreat of Prescott's men from the redoubt. Putnam, the ranking officer on the field, Warren disclaiming all right to command, withdrew men with entrenching tools from Prescott, and planned to throw up earthworks on the higher eminence, now known as Bunker Hill proper, and near the end of the retreat he assumed a general command, and directed the fortifying of Prospect Hill. It is not apparent, then, that any officer, previous to this last stage of the fight, can be said to have had general command in all parts of the field. The discussion of the claims of Putnam and Prescott has resulted in a large number of monographs, and has formed a particular feature in many of the general accounts of the battle, the mention of some of which has for this reason been deferred till they could be placed in the appended note.[566]

A list of officers in the battle, not named in Frothingham's Siege, is given in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1873; and an English list of the Yankee officers in the force about Boston in June, 1775, is in Ibid., July, 1874. The Lives of participants and observers add occasionally some items to the story.[567]

This follows the reproduction of an engraving in J. C. Smith's Brit. Mezzotint Portraits, p. 1716, which is inscribed: Israel Putnam, Esq., Major-General of the Connecticut forces, and Commander-in-chief at the engagement on Buncker's-Hill, near Boston, 17 June, 1775. Published by C. Shepherd, 9 Sep^r 1775. J. Wilkinson pinxt. (Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xix. 102.) There is a French engraving, representing him in cocked hat, looking down and aside, and subscribed "Israel Putnam, Eq^re., major général des Troupes de Connecticut. Il commandait en chef à l'affaire de Bunckes hill près Boston, le 17 Juin, 1775." Col. J. Trumbull made a sketch of Putnam, which has been engraved by W. Humphreys (National Portrait Gallery, N. Y., 1834) and by Thomas Gimbrede.

Cf. portraits in Murray's Impartial Hist. (1778), i. 334; Hollister's Connecticut; Irving's Washington, illus. ed., i. 413; and Geschichte der Kriege in und ausser Europa (Nürnberg, 1778).

For lives of Putnam, see Sabin, xvi. no. 66,804, etc. For his birthplace, see Appleton's Journal, xi. 321; Miss Larned's Windham County, Conn. Cf. B. J. Lossing in Harper's Monthly, xii. 577; Evelyns in America, 273; R. H. Stoddard in Nat. Mag., xii. 97.

JOSEPH WARREN.

After a copperplate by J. Norman in An Impartial Hist. of the War in America (Boston, 1781), vol. ii. p. 210. The best known picture of Warren is a small canvas by Copley, belonging to Dr. John Collins Warren, of Boston, which has been often engraved, and is given in mezzotint by H. W. Smith in Frothingham's Life of Warren. The picture in Faneuil Hall is painted after this, and Thomas Illman has engraved that copy. A larger canvas by Copley, painted not long before that artist left Boston for England, is owned by Dr. Buckminster Brown, of Boston, and was engraved for the first time in the Mem. Hist. of Boston, iii. 60, where will be found accounts of various contemporary prints and memorials of Warren (pp. 59, 61, 142, 143), including his house at Roxbury, the manuscript of his Massacre Oration, etc. Cf. Frothingham's Warren, p. 546; Hist. Mag., Dec., 1857; Loring's Hundred Boston Orators, p. 67; Mrs. J. B. Brown's Stories of General Warren; Life of Dr. John Warren; the Warren Genealogy; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Sept., 1866. The earliest eulogy was that by Perez Morton in 1776 (Loring's Hundred Boston Orators, 327; Niles's Principles and Acts, 1876, p. 30), and the earliest memoir of any extent was that by A. H. Everett, in Sparks's Amer. Biography (vol. x.). There are reminiscences in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., xii. 113, 234, which were based by Gen. William H. Sumner on some letters published by him in 1825 in the Boston Patriot, when, as adjutant-general of the State, he arranged for the appearance of the Bunker Hill veterans in the celebration of that year, and derived some reminiscences from them respecting Warren's appearance and action during the fight. All other accounts of Warren, however, have been eclipsed by Frothingham's Life of Warren (Boston, 1865). In the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (June 17, 1875), Dr. John Jeffries (son of the surgeon of the British army who saw Warren's body on the field) published a paper on his death. Cf. also R. J. Speirr in Potter's Amer. Monthly, v. 571; Frothingham's Warren, pp. 519, 523; Barry's Massachusetts, i. 37, and references.

The grateful intentions expressed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives (April 4, 1776), by the Continental Congress (April 8, 1777; Sept. 6, 1778; July 1, 1780,—see Journals of Congress), and by the Congress of the United States (Jan. 30, 1846,—Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., ii. 337), have never been carried out. Benedict Arnold manifested a special interest in the welfare of Warren's children (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1857, p. 122). The Freemasons erected a pillar to his memory on the battlefield in 1794, which disappeared when the present obelisk was begun in 1825. There is a view of the pillar in the Analectic Mag., March, 1818, and in Snow's Boston, 309. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 65. A statue of Warren, by Henry Dexter, was placed in a pavilion near the obelisk in 1857. Cf. G. W. Warren's Hist. of the Bunker Hill Monument Association; Frothingham's Warren, p. 547.

Among the anniversary discourses upon the battle, a few will bear reading. The earliest was by Josiah Bartlett in 1794, published by B. Edes, in Boston, the next year. Daniel Webster made a famous address at the laying of the corner-stone of the monument in 1825, which can be found in his Works, i. 59. (Cf. Analectic Mag., vol. xi.; A. Levasseur's Lafayette en Amérique, Paris, 1829.) The same orator, at the completion of the monument in 1843, embodied little of historical interest in his Address. (Works, i. 89.[568]) Alexander H. Everett's Address in 1836 was subsequently inwoven in his Life of Warren. The Rev. George E. Ellis began his conspicuous labors in this field in his discourse in 1841. Edward Everett spoke in 1850 (Orations, etc., iii. p. 3), and Gen. Charles Devens, at the Centennial in 1875, delivered an oration, which was published by the city of Boston. The most noteworthy address since that time was that of Robert C. Winthrop at the unveiling of the statue of Colonel William Prescott, June 17, 1881.[569] This statue, of which an engraving will be found in the Mem. Hist. of Boston (iv. 410), stands near the base of the monument.[570]

We turn now to the accounts on the British side. The orderly-books of General Howe are preserved among Lord Dorchester's (Carleton's) Papers in the Royal Institution, London. Sparks made extracts from them, now in no. xlv. of the Sparks MSS. in Harvard College library. Extracts relating to the dispositions for the day of the battle, and for subsequent days, are given by Ellis (1843) p. 88.[571] Cf. Mag. of Amer. Hist., 1885, p. 214. The more immediate English notes and comments on the battle can be best grouped in a note.[572]

During 1775 there were two English accounts, aiming at something like historical perspective. One of these was, very likely, by Edmund Burke, and was in the Annual Register (p. 133, etc.). The other was An Impartial and Authentic Narrative of the Battle fought on the 17th of June, 1775, between his Britannic Majesty's Troops and the American Provincial Army on Bunker's Hill near Charles Town in New England. The author was John Clark, a first lieutenant of marines. He gives a speech of Howe to his men, representing that it was delivered just as he advanced to the attack, but this and much else in the book are considered of doubtful authenticity.[573]

In 1780 there appeared in the London Chronicle some letters by Israel Mauduit, which were republished the same year as Three letters to Lord Viscount Howe: added, Remarks on the battle of Bunker's Hill (London, 1780), which in a second edition (1781) reads additionally in the title, To which is added a comparative view of the Conduct of Lord Cornwallis and General Howe. There was among the Chalmers' MSS. (Thorpe's Supplemental Catal., 1843, no. 660) a writing entitled Some particulars of the battle of Bunker's Hill, the situation of the ground, etc. (8 pp., 1784), which Chalmers calls a "most curious paper in the handwriting of Israel Mauduit, found among his pamphlets, Jan. 23, 1789."

In 1784 William Carter's Genuine Detail of the Royal and American Armies appeared in London. Carter was a lieutenant in the Fortieth Foot, and his book was seemingly reissued in 1785, with a new title-page. (Brinley, no. 1,789; Stevens, Bibl. Amer., 1885, nos. 80, 81; Harvard Coll. lib., 6351.16.)

Note.—The fac-simile on this page is of a handbill, printed in Boston, giving the tory side of the fight at Bunker Hill,—after an original in the library of the Mass. Hist. Society.

Note.—This sketch of Bunker Hill Battle, made for Lord Rawdon, follows a tracing of the original belonging to Dr. Emmet of New York, furnished to me by Mr. Benson J. Lossing. A finished drawing from this sketch is given in the Mem. Hist. of Boston, vol. iii. Cf. Harper's Mag. xlvii., p. 18. The spire in the foreground is that of the West Church, which stood where Dr. Bartol's church, in Cambridge Street, Boston, now stands, showing that the sketcher was on Beacon hill, 138 feet above the water. The smoke from the frigate to the right of the spire rises against the higher hill where Putnam endeavored to rally the retreating provincials. This hill is 110 feet above the water, and about one mile and a half distant from the spectator. One hundred and thirty rods to the right of this summit is the crown of the lower or Breed's Hill, where the redoubt was, which is 62 feet above the sea. Dr. Emmet secured this picture and another of the slope of the hill, taken after the battle, and showing the broken fences (Mem. Hist. of Boston, iii. 88), at the sale of the effects of the Marquis of Hastings, who was a descendant of Lord Rawdon, then on Gage's staff (Harper's Monthly Mag., 1875). The earliest engraved picture of the battle is one cut by Roman, which was published the same year, and appeared also in Sept., 1775, on a reduced scale, in the Pennsylvania Magazine. It has been reproduced in Frothingham's Centennial: Battle of Bunker Hill (1875), in Moore's Ballad History, and in other of the Centennial memorials. In 1781 a poem by George Cockings, The American War (London), had a somewhat extraordinary picture, which has been reproduced in Gay's Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 401, by S. A. Drake, and others. In 1786 Col. John Trumbull painted his well-known picture of the battle, which has been often engraved. (Cf. Trumbull's Autobiography; N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., xv.; Tuckerman's Book of the Artists; Harper's Magazine, Nov., 1879.) Trumbull claimed that the following figures in his picture were portraits: Warren, Putnam, Howe, Clinton, Small, and the two Pitcairns.

In the Mass. Magazine, Sept., 1789, there is a view of Charlestown, showing Bunker's and Breed's hills, with their original contours. It is reproduced in Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 554, with a note upon other early views. Frothingham (Siege, p. 121) gives one from an early manuscript which closely resembles the topography of the Rawdon sketch; and again (Centennial, etc.) another which is in fact the perspective sketch of the town at the edge of Price's view of Boston (1743), converted into a panoramic picture (Mem. Hist. of Boston, ii. 329).

The Gentleman's Mag., Feb., 1790, has a view of Charlestown, with the tents of the British army on the hill, taken after the battle, and from Copp's Hill. It shows the wharves and ruins of the town. (Cf. note in Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 88.)

The account of the loyalist Jones (N. Y. during the Rev., i. 52) has his usual twist of vision, though he is severe on Gage for "taking the bull by the horns" in making an attack in front.

CHARLESTOWN PENINSULA, 1775.

Sketched from a plan by Montresor, showing the redoubt erected by the British, after June 17, on the higher eminence of Bunker Hill. The original is in the library of Congress, where is a plan on a large scale of this principal redoubt.

The long list of general histories on the British side, detailing the events of the battle, begins with Murray's Impartial Hist. of the War (London, 1778; Newcastle, 1782), and is made up during the rest of that century by the Hist. of the War published at Dublin (1779-85); Hall's Civil War in America (1780); The Detail and Conduct of the Amer. War (1780); Andrews's Hist. of the War (1785, vol. i. 301,—quoted at length by Ryerson, Loyalists, i. 461); Stedman, Hist. Amer. War (London, 1794, vol. i. 125). The best of the later historians is Mahon (Hist. of England, vi.), who was forced to admit, when pressed upon the question, that the American claims of victory, which he says they have always held, appear only in the reports of later British tourists (vol. vi., App. xxix.). Lecky, in his brief account (England in the Eighteenth Century, iii. 463), makes an intention of Gage to fortify the Charlestown and not the Dorchester heights the incentive to the American occupation of the former. Edw. Bernard's History of England (London) has a curious "View of the Attack on Bunker's Hill, with the burning of Charlestown."

Something confirmatory, rather than of original value, can be gained from the histories of various regiments which took part in the battle, as detailed in the series of Historical Records of such regiments.[574]

The battle almost immediately found commemoration in British ballads (Hist. Mag., ii. 58; v. 251; Hale's Hundred Years Ago, p. 7), and the slain were commemorated in elegiac verses, as in M. M. Robinson's To a young lady, on the death of her brother, slain in the late engagement at Boston (London, 1776). The same year there appeared at Philadelphia The Battle of Bunker's Hill, a dramatic piece in five acts, in heroic measure, by a gentleman of Maryland.

Note.—The references in the corner of this cut, too fine to be easily read in this reduced fac-simile, are as follows:—

"A A. First position, where the troops remained until reinforcements arrived.

B B. Second position.

C C C. Ground on which the different regiments marched to form the line.

D D. Direction in which the attack was made upon the redoubt and breastwork.

E E. Position of a part of the 47th and marines, to silence the fire of a barn at E.

F. First position of the cannon.

G. Second position of the cannon in advancing with the grenadiers, but stopped by the marsh.

H. Breastwork formed of pickets, hay, stones, etc., with the pieces of cannon.

I I. Light infantry advancing along the shore to force the right of the breastwork H.

L L. The "Lively" and "Falcon" hauled close to shore, to rake the low grounds before the troops advanced.

M M. Gondolas that fired on the rebels in their retreat.

N. Battery of cannon, howitzers, and mortars on Copp's Hill, that battered the redoubt and set fire to Charlestown.

O O O. The rebels behind all the stone walls, trees, and brush-wood, and their numbers uncertain, having constantly large columns to reinforce them during the action.

P. Place from whence the grenadiers received a very heavy fire.

Q. Place of the fifty-second regiment on the night of the 17th.

R. Forty-seventh regiment, in Charlestown, on the night of the 17th.

S. Detachments in the mill and two storehouses.

T. Breastwork thrown up by the remainder of the troops on the night of the 17th.

Note. The distance from Boston to Charlestown is about 550 yards."

Its author is said to be Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and the frontispiece, "The Death of Warren", by Norman, is held to be the earliest engraving in British America by a native artist (Hunnewell, p. 13; Brinley, no. 1,787; Sabin, ii. 7,184; xiv. 58,640). In 1779 there was printed at Danvers, America Invincible, an heroic poem, in two books: a Battle at Bunker Hill, by an officer of rank in the Continental army (Hunnewell, p. 13). In 1781 an anonymous poem was published in London, known later to be the production of George Cockings, and called The American War, in which the names of the officers who have distinguished themselves during the war are introduced (Brinley, no. 1,788; Hunnewell, p. 14). Of later use of the battle in fiction, it is only necessary to name Cooper's novel of Lionel Lincoln and O. W. Holmes's Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1875, p. 33).

The chief enumerations which have been heretofore made of the plans of the battle of Bunker Hill are by Frothingham, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 53; by Hunnewell in his Bibliog. of Charlestown, p. 17; and by Winsor in the Mem. Hist. of Boston, iii. (introduction). The earliest rude sketches are by Stiles in his diary (Dawson, p. 393), and one formed by printer's rules in Rivington's Gazetteer, Aug. 3, 1775 (Frothingham's Siege, p. 397, and Dawson, p. 390). Montresor, of the British engineers, very soon made a survey of the field, and this was used by Lieutenant Page in drawing a plan of the action, which he carried to England with him when, on account of wounds received while acting as an aid to Howe, he was given leave of absence (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., June, 1875, p. 56). In the Faden collection (nos. 25-30) of maps in the library of Congress there are Page's rough and finished plans, drawn before the British works on the hill were begun, and also plans by Montresor and R. W., of the Welsh Fusiliers. Page's plan, as engraved, was issued in London in 1776, and called A Plan of the Action at Bunker's Hill.[575]

Page's, however, was not the first engraved. One "by an officer on the spot" was published in London, Nov. 27, 1775, called Plan of the battle on Bunker's Hill. Fought on the 17th of June, which was issued as a broadside, with Burgoyne's letter to Lord Stanley on the same sheet. The central position of the Americans is called "Warren's redoubt." This is reproduced in F. Moore's Ballad History of the Revolution.

Another contemporary British plan—discovered probably "in the baggage of a British officer", after the royal troops left Boston in March, 1776, but not brought to light till forty years later, when it was mentioned in a newspaper in Wilkesbarre, Penn., as having been found in an old drawer—was one made by Henry de Bernière, of the Tenth Royal Infantry, on nearly the same scale as Page's, but less accurately.

It was engraved in 1818 in the Analectic Magazine (Philad., p. 150), and a fac-simile of that engraving is annexed. The text accompanying it states that its general accuracy had been vouched for by Governor Brooks, General Dearborn, Dr. A. Dexter, Deacon Thos. Miller, John Kettell, Dr. Bartlett, the Hon. James Winthrop, and Mr. [Judge] Prescott. General Dearborn and Deacon Miller thought the rail fence too far in the rear of the redoubt, having been really nearly in the line of it. Judge Winthrop and Dr. Bartlett thought the map in this particular correct. There was the same division of belief regarding the cannon behind the fence, Dearborn and Miller believing there were none there, Brooks and Winthrop holding the contrary. Other witnesses represented to the editor of the Magazine that there was no interval between the breastwork and the fence, but that an imperfect line of defence connected the redoubt with the Mystick shore, as represented in Stedman's (Page's) map.[576]

In the Portfolio (March, 1818) General Dearborn criticised the plan (Dawson, p. 406), and, using the same plate in his separate issue of his comments, he imposed in red his ideas of the position of the works, and this was in turn criticised by Governor Brooks.[577] Mr. G. G. Smith made a (plan) Sketch of the Battle of Bunker Hill by a British Officer (Boston, 1843), which grew out of the plan and the comments on it. Bernière's plan was also used by Colonel Swett as the basis of the one which he published in his History of the Battle of Bunker Hill (1828, 1826, 1827), which has been frequently copied (Ellis, Lossing, etc.). The latest attempt to map the phases of the action critically is by Carrington in his Battles of the Revolution (p. 112), who gives an eclectic plan. Plans adopting the features of earlier ones are in the English translation of Botta's War of Independence, Grant's British Battles (ii. 144). A plan of the present condition of the ground, by Thomas W. Davis, superposing the line of the American works, is given in the Bunker Hill Monument Association's Proceedings (1876). A map of Charlestown in 1775 with a plan of the battle was prepared and published in 1875 by James E. Stone. A plan of the works as reconstructed by the British, and deserted by them in March, 1776, is given in Carter's Genuine detail, etc. (London, 1784), which is reproduced in Frothingham's Siege, p. 330. Other MS. plans of their works on both hills are in the Faden maps in the library of Congress.

Before the war closed a plan was engraved by Norman, a Boston engraver, which is the earliest to appear near the scene itself. This was a Plan of the town of Boston with the attack on Bunker's Hill, in the peninsula of Charlestown, on June 17, 1775 (measuring 11-1/2 × 7 inches), which is, however, of no topographical value as respects the action. It appeared in Murray's Impartial History (1778), i. p. 430, and in An Impartial History of the War in America (Boston, 1781, vol. i.), and a reduced fac-simile of it is annexed.[578]

C. The American Camp.—A variety of journals and diaries have been preserved, the best known of which is that of Dr. Thacher, a surgeon on Prospect Hill.[579]

The daily life of the Cambridge camp is best seen in the letters sent from it, and foremost in interest among such are those of Washington.[580] From the Roxbury camp there are letters of General Thomas in the Thomas Papers, where is one of Dr. John Morgan, the medical director. Several from Jedediah Huntington are preserved in the Trumbull Papers, and are printed in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., xlix.[581] The principal letters from the Winter Hill camp are those of General Sullivan,[582] and a few have been printed written at the Prospect Hill camp.[583]

Something of the spirit prevailing in Watertown, where the Provincial Congress was sitting, can be seen in the letters of James Warren and Samuel Cooper.[584]

There are in the library of the Amer. Antiq. Soc. at Worcester several orderly-books of the siege,[585] and others are preserved elsewhere.[586]

D. The British Camp.—The condition of Boston during the siege must be learned from various sources. The Boston News-Letter was still published, but numbers of it are very scarce for this period, and no other of the Boston newspapers continued to be published in the town.[587] It was a convenient vehicle for the British generals, and any morsel of news likely to be distasteful to the patriots, like the intercepted correspondence of Washington and John Adams, was pretty sure to reach the American lines through its columns. The correspondence of the generals is preserved in the British Archives and in the papers at the Royal Institution (London), and occasionally some few letters, like those of Percy in the Boston Public Library, have been found elsewhere. It is charged that Gage's papers were stolen in Boston.[588] Some new glimpses were got when Fonblanque published his Life of Burgoyne.[589] The best accounts of the succession of events in the town and the daily life are found in Dr. Ellis's "Chronicles of the Siege",[590] and in Mr. Horace E. Scudder's "Life in Boston during the Siege", a chapter in the Memorial Hist. of Boston, vol. iii.,[591] which may be consulted (p. 154) for various sources respecting the details of the privations and amusements of the people and the garrison, and of the vicissitudes of its buildings and landmarks.[592] An account of the British works in Boston is given in Frothingham's Siege of Boston, and the Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 79. The current record of the outposts, etc., is noted in Moore's Diary of the Rev., 109, etc. Carrington (Battles, 154) refers to a MS. narrative of experiences in the town by one Edw. Stow. Some of the correspondence of the Boston selectmen with Thomas, at Roxbury, is in the Thomas Papers. It is, however, to the diaries, letters, and orderly-books which have been preserved that we must go for the details of life in the beleaguered town.[593]

E. Boston Evacuated.—The letters of Washington[594] best enable us to follow the movements, but they may be supplemented by other contemporary accounts.[595]

Howe's despatch to Dartmouth, dated Nantasket Roads, is in Dawson, i. 94.[596] His conduct of the siege is criticised in A view of the evidence relative to the Conduct of the American War (1779). Contemporary dissatisfaction was expressed in an ironical congratulatory poem published in London (Sabin, iv., 15,476).

One Crean Brush,[597] acting under orders of Howe, endeavored to carry off the merchandise from the stores of the town, so far as he could, on a vessel put at his disposal. Howe's proclamation in his favor is in fac-simile in the Mem. Hist. of Boston, iii. 97. Brush's vessel was later captured by Manly (Evacuation Memorial, 166). Similar experience in trying to escape with his merchandise was suffered by Jolley Allen, as portrayed in his Account of a part of his sufferings and losses, ed. by C. C. Smith, given in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Feb., 1878, and separately. Allen's narrative was reprinted in the spelling of the original MS. in An Account of a part of the sufferings and losses of Jolley Allen, a native of London, with a preface and Notes by Mrs. Frances Mary Stoddard (Boston, 1883). An inventory of the stores left by the British is in the Siege of Boston, 406.[598] In the cabinet of this society is a handbill adopted by the freeholders of Boston, Nov. 18 [1776?], calling upon all who had suffered in property in Boston since March, 1775, to report the same to a committee.[599]

Washington's instructions (April 4, 1776) to Ward are in the printed Heath Papers, P. 4. The Mass. legislature, April 30, 1776, ordered beacons to be set at Cape Ann, Marblehead, and Blue Hill, ready to be fired in case of the enemy's reappearing, which was for a long time dreaded. Ward writes to Washington of his measures in progress.[600]

The correspondence of John Adams and John Winthrop (Mass. Hist. Coll., xlv.) shows constant anxiety lest the defences should not be prepared in case of need.[601]

SIEGE OF BOSTON, 1776.

The westerly half of the map in the octavo atlas of Marshall's Washington, which is a reduction of the map in the earlier quarto atlas (1804). It is reproduced in the French translations of Marshall and of Botta.

The cut on the title of the present volume represents one side of the medal given by Congress to Washington, to commemorate his raising the siege of Boston.[602]

F. Maps of the Siege of Boston.—Plans of Boston and its neighborhood, including its harbor, for the illustration of the siege of Boston, are numerous, and the account of them given in the Mem. Hist. of Boston (iii., introd.) is in the main followed in the present enumeration, which divides them into those of American, English, French, and German origin, and adheres as far as possible to the order of publication in each group.

The earliest American is the 1769 (or last) edition of what is known as Price's edition of Bonner's map of Boston, which had done service since 1722 by successive changes in the plate, this last issue showing Hancock's Wharf, and "Esqr. Hancock's seat" on Beacon Street.[603] This map sufficed for local use till the events of 1775 induced new interest in the topography, when the earliest response came from Philadelphia, where C. Lownes engraved A new plan of Boston Harbour from an actual survey, for the Pennsylvania Magazine. It presented a reminder of the great event of the year in its "N. B. Charlestown burnt, June 17, 1775, by the Regulars." There is another Draught of the Harbour of Boston and the adjacent towns and roads, a manuscript, dated 1775, among the Belknap Papers, i. 84, in the cabinet of the Mass. Hist. Society. The same Pennsylvania Magazine, the next month (July, 1775), gave as engraved by Aitkins A new and correct plan of the town of Boston and Provincial Camp. The town seems to be taken from a plan which had appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine (London) the previous January; but in one corner was added a plan of the circumvallating lines of the besieging army.[604] Later in the season two other plans were made, showing the American lines, which were not published, however, till long after. One is given in Force's American Archives, 4th series, vol. iii.,[605] and the other was made by Col. John Trumbull, in Sept., 1775, which was published in his Autobiography in 1841.[606] Of about the same time is another very small Plan of Boston and its environs, showing the circumvallating lines, which is in one corner of a large Map of the Seat of Civil War in America, engraved by B. Romans, and dedicated to Hancock. There is also, in the library of the Mass. Hist. Society, a rude plan of the harbor and vicinity, showing the positions of the provincials, which are reckoned at 20,000, while the royal forces are put at 8,000. I find no other American plan till Norman's, in 1781, reproduced on another page; and not another till The Seat of the late War at Boston appeared in the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine, July, 1789, p. 444, but this is a rather scant map of the country as far inland as Worcester. Gordon had the year before this given a map in his American Revolution (London, 1788) based on English sources; but it has been the foundation of most of the eclectic maps since published in this country.[607]

In 1822 a Mr. Finch printed in Silliman's Journal an account of the traces then remaining of the earthworks of the siege, both American and British.[608] There is an enumeration of the different sections of the lines, within and without Boston, in the Mem. Hist. Boston (vol. iii. 104).[609]

The earliest English plan of this period is one called A plan of Boston and Charlestown from a drawing made in 1771, which occupies the margin of a larger map, engraved for The Town and Country Magazine in 1776, later to be mentioned. The Catalogue of the King's Maps (British Museum) shows a colored plan of Boston and vicinity (1773) in the centre of a large sheet, with marginal views (later to be described).

In 1774 a Plan of the town of Boston made part of a Chart of the Coast of New England, which appeared in the London Magazine, April, 1774, and in The American Atlas, issued by Thomas Jefferys in London, in 1776. This map seems to be the model of a New and accurate Plan of the town of Boston, which is engraved in the corner of A Map of the most inhabited part of New England, by Thomas Jefferys, Nov. 29, 1774, usually also found in The American Atlas (1776, nos. 15 and 16). This map is found with the date 1755, even after changes of a later date had been made in the plate.[610] The original map has also a marginal plan of Boston harbor (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., September, 1864).

The earliest English map of 1775 is one which appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine (January, 1775), though it is dated Feb. 1, 1775. It shows the town and harbor.[611]

In the June number of the Gentleman's Magazine is a "map of the country one hundred miles round Boston, in order to show the situation and march of the troops, as well provincial as regulars, which are now within sight of each other, and are hourly expected to engage."

In June, 1775, was also made a not very accurate map of the town and its environs, which was published in London, Aug. 28, to satisfy the eagerness for a map of the region to which the news of the battle of Bunker Hill had turned all eyes. It is to be found in the first volume of Almon's Remembrancer, and is reproduced herewith. A few weeks after the fight at Charlestown there was probably made in Boston the MS. plan of Boston and circumjacent Country, showing the present situation of the king's troops and the rebel intrenchments. It is dated July 25, 1775, and is owned by Dr. Charles Deane.[612]

The largest chart which we have of Boston harbor of this period is dated August 5, 1775, and was the work of Samuel Holland, the surveyor-general of the Northern colonies, who was for some years employed on a coast survey.[613] It takes in Nahant, Nantasket, and Cambridge, and was based principally on the surveys of George Callendar (1769).[614] When Des Barres included it in his Atlantic Neptune (part iii., no. 6, 1780-1783), he marked in the besieging lines, and dated it Dec. 1, 1781, and in this state Des Barres also used it in his Coast and Harbors of New England.[615]

A map showing thirty miles round Boston, and bearing date Aug. 14, 1775, is in the king's library (British Museum), and is signed by M. Armstrong. It has marginal statistical tables, and in the upper right-hand corner is a plan of the "action near Charlestown, 17 June, 1775."[616] There is among the Force maps in the library of Congress the MS. original of the map (sketched herewith as Boston and Charlestown, 1775), which is called A Draught of the Towns of Boston and Charlestown and the circumjacent country, shewing the works thrown up by his Majesty's Troops, and also those by the Rebels during the campaign of 1775. N. B. The rebel entrenchments are expressed as they appear from Beacon Hill.

On August 28th the British town-major in Boston, James Urquhart, licensed Henry Pelham to make a Plan of Boston with its environs. It was engraved in aquatints in London, on two sheets, and not published till June 2, 1777. Dr. Belknap, who was much troubled to find a correct plan of the town for this period, thought Pelham's was the best.[617]

BOSTON AND CHARLESTOWN, 1775.

There are among the Faden MSS. in the library of Congress two MS. maps. One is probably the best plan of Boston itself of this period, and the other the best of those of the vicinity.[618] They represent the conditions of 1775, though they were not engraved and published by William Faden in London till Oct. 1, 1777, and Oct. 1, 1778, respectively. They are both, in the main, after a survey by William Page, of the British engineers. The first is called A Plan of the Town of Boston, with the Intrenchments, etc., of his Majesty's forces in 1775, from the observations of Lieut. Page and from the plans of other gentlemen. It gives the peninsula only, with a small portion of Charlestown, and was again issued in Oct., 1778.[619] The second is Boston, its environs and harbour, with the Rebels' works raised against that town in 1775, from the observations of Lieut. Page, and from the plans of Capt. Montresor. It includes Point Alderton, Chelsea, Cambridge, and Dorchester, and there is a copy in the library of the Mass. Hist. Society.

BRITISH LINES ON BOSTON NECK, 1775-76.

This is from Page's Plan of the Town of Boston, published in London in 1777, and is accompanied by the following Key:—a, redoubt; b, block-house for cannon; c, six 24-pounders, 2 royals; d, four 9-pounders; e, six 24-pounders; f, left bastion; g, right bastion; h, h, guard-houses; i, i, traverses; k, k, magazines; l, l, abattis; m, m, m, routes-du-pols; n, block-house for musketry; o, floating battery, 2 guns; p, p, fleches, 1 sub. and 20 men. The building beyond the outer lines and near the edge of the upland is Brown's house, the scene of skirmishes during the siege (Mem. Hist. of Boston, iii. 80; Heath's Memoirs). The narrowest part of the neck was at the present Dover Street where it intersects Washington Street. The foundations of the main works at this point were laid bare in digging a drain in March, 1860. The outer works were just within Blackstone and Franklin squares. There are views of these lines in the Faden Collection in the library of Congress, dated August, 1775, probably the original of the engraved views which accompany Des Barres' coast survey, and of which there are reproductions in the Mem. Hist. of Boston, iii. 80. Cf. also Frothingham's Siege, p. 315. The same Faden Collection has a pen-and-ink plan of the lines, dated Aug., 1775 (no. 37 of the Catal.).

During the summer of 1775, John Trumbull, then an aid to General Spencer, crawled up, under cover of the tall grass, near enough to the British lines to sketch them; but a continuance of the hazardous exploit was soon rendered unnecessary by the desertion of a British artilleryman, who brought with him a rude plan of the entire work. So Trumbull says in his Autobiography, p. 22. Washington, on comparing this surreptitious sketch with the deserter's plan, found them so nearly to correspond that Trumbull thinks his own future promotion probably arose from it. Trumbull's sketch and the memorandum of the deserter "from the Welsh fusileers" seem to have been the basis of a careful drawing of the British lines, prepared apparently at headquarters in Cambridge, as it bears the handwriting of Washington's aid, Thomas Mifflin, an explanatory table of the armament in the works. This found its way into that portion of the Papers of Arthur Lee which went to the Amer. Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and from it a reduced heliotype is given in the Mem. Hist. of Boston, iii. p. 80. Washington sent a copy of the plan, nearly duplicate, to Congress, and this is given in Force's Amer. Archives, 4th ser., i. p. 29, and is reproduced on a smaller scale in Wheildon's Siege and Evacuation of Boston, p. 34. (Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., April, 1879, p. 62.) There are two other American drawings of the lines, of less importance. One is in the Pennsylvania Magazine for Aug., 1775, and is called An exact plan of Gen. Gage's lines on Boston Neck in America, July 31, 1775. The other is a small marginal view of The Lines thrown up on Boston neck by the ministerial army, making part of the Seat of the Civil War, by Romans. A rude powder-horn plan is noted in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. (Nov., 1881), xix. 103. One of the Faden MS. plans shows a proposed star redoubt at a point outside the lines.

In October, 1775, an "Engineer at Boston", Lieut. Richard Williams, made and sent over to England a plan showing the "redoubt taken from the rebels by General Howe", the British camp on the higher summit of Bunker Hill, together with the American lines at Cambridge and Roxbury. In London it was compared with "several other curious drawings", from which additions were made, when it was published by Andrew Dury, March 12, 1776, as engraved by Jno. Lodge for the late Mr. Jefferys, and called Plan of Boston and its environs, showing the true situation of his Majesty's Army, and also those of the rebels.[620] In the same month (Oct., 1775) a Plan of Boston, with Charlestown marked as in ruins, appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine (p. 464). Another Map of Boston and Charlestown, by an English officer present at Bunker Hill, was published in London, Nov. 25, 1775. The last map made during the British occupation of Boston was An accurate map of the Country round Boston in New England, published by A. Hamilton, Jr., near St. John's Gate, Jan. 16, 1776, appearing in the Town and Country Magazine. It measures 11-1/2 × 12-1/2 inches, and extends from Plymouth to Ipswich, and inland to Groton and Providence.

The evacuation of Boston in March, 1776, removed the centre of interest elsewhere, but there was for some time an apprehension of the return of the British for a naval attack; and while the Americans were fortifying the harbor, the English were publishing in London several maps of its configuration. The earliest was a Chart of Massachusetts Bay and Boston Harbour, published April 29, 1776. With the date changed to Dec. 1, 1781, it was subsequently included by Des Barres in the Atlantic Neptune, and in the Charts of the Coast and Harbors of New England, 1781.[621] Another Chart of Boston Bay, whose limits include Salem, Watertown, and Scituate, following Holland's surveys, was published Nov. 13, 1776, and later appeared, dated Dec. 1, 1781, in the Atlantic Neptune, and in the Coast and Harbors of New England. A chart of the harbor, with soundings, was also included in the North American Pilot for New England (London, 1776), showing a solitary tree on the peninsula marked "Ruins of Charlestown." There was a second edition of the Pilot in 1800. A small plan of the harbor is also in the margin of Carrington Bowles's Map of the seat of war in New England (London, 1776).

The first eclectic map was that published by Gordon in his Amer. Revolution (London, 1788), which he based on Pelham's map for the country, and Page's for the harbor.[622]

The French maps published in Paris were almost always based on English sources. Such were the Carte de la baye de Baston (no. 30), and Plan de la ville de Baston (no. 31), in Le Petit Atlas maritime, vol. i., Amérique Septentrionale, par le S. Bellin, 1764. There are several other French maps without date, but probably a little antedating the outbreak of hostilities. Such are a Plan de la ville et du port de Boston, published by Lattré in Paris;[623] and a small map, Plan de la ville de Boston et ses environs, engraved by B. D. Bakker. An engraved map, without date, is in the British Museum, called Carte des environs de Boston, capitale de la N^lle Angleterre en Amérique.[624] It carries the coast from below Plymouth to above the Merrimac. There is in the Poore collection of maps in the Mass. State Archives a Carte de la baye de Baston (marked Tome i. no. 30).

The only dated map of this period is a Carte du porte et havre de Boston, par le Chevalier de Beaurain (Paris, 1776). The corner vignette shows a soldier bearing a banner with a pine-tree. Frothingham, who reëngraved this picture, could find no earlier representation of the pine-tree flag.

The English (1774) map of the "most inhabited part of New England" was reproduced "after the original by M. Le Rouge, 1777", under the title of La Nouvelle Angleterre en 4 feuilles; and it was again used in the Atlas Ameriquain Septentrional, à Paris, chez Le Rouge (1778), repeating the map of Boston, with names in English and descriptions in French. Another reproduction from the English appeared in the Carte particulière du Havre de Boston, reduite de la carte anglaise de Des Barres par ordre de M. de Sartine (1780). It belongs to the Neptune Americo-Septentrional, publié par ordre du Roi.

There is among the Rochambeau maps (no. 14), in the library of Congress, a Plan d'une partie de la rade de Boston, done in color, about eight inches wide by sixteen high, showing the forts and giving an elaborate key.

There is a curious map of Boston and its harbor, with names in Latin, but apparently of German make, Ichnographia urbis Boston and Ichnographia portus Bostoniensis, which make part of a larger map, perhaps the Nova Anglia of Homann of Nuremberg. The Geschichte der Kriege in und ausser Europa, published also at Nuremberg in 1776 (erste theil) has a map of Boston. Of the same date (1776), and belonging to the Geographische Belustigungen für Erläuterung der neuesten Weltgeschichte (Zweytes Stück), published at Leipsic, is a Carte von dem Hafen und der Stadt Boston, following the French map of Beaurain even to reproducing the group with the pine-tree banner. It embraces a circuit about Boston of which the outer limits are Chelsea, Cambridge, Dorchester, Long Island, Deer Island, and Pulling Point.

G. The Capture of Ticonderoga, 1775.—It is in dispute who planned and who conducted the capture of Ticonderoga. On Feb. 21, 1775, Col. John Brown had suggested it to Warren (Force's Archives). Arnold made a statement of the post's defenceless condition to the Committee of Safety in Cambridge, April 30, 1775 (Mass. Archives, cxlvi. p. 30; Amer. Bibliopolist, 1873, p. 79). On the 2d of May he was given a money credit and munitions, and on the 3d he was definitely instructed to organize his party (Mass. Archives, cxlvi. p. 39). It is claimed that some purpose of acting on the suggestion of Brown prompted in part, at least, the Massachusetts provincial congress to appoint early in April a committee to proceed to Connecticut and the other New England colonies. Whether it was by their instigation, by certain movements in Connecticut, or by the direct agency of Arnold that the plan was formed, it is difficult to say. It is also claimed that the plan grew out of a conference with the Massachusetts delegates to the Philadelphia Congress, when, on their way, they stopped at Hartford and held a session with Governor Trumbull and his council (Force's Archives, ii. 507; Wells's Sam. Adams, ii. 298). Bancroft and the Connecticut antiquaries find the beginning rather in the impulses of one Parsons, who had just returned from Massachusetts, and had got from Benedict Arnold, whom he met on the way, a statement of the plunder to be obtained there, and, without any formal consent of the governor and council, proceeded in the organization of a committee in Connecticut (Bancroft, orig. ed., vii. 338; final revision, iv. 182). Official sanction was first evoked when Massachusetts, a few days later, commissioned Arnold (Mass. Archives, cxlvi. 130, 139; American Bibliopolist, 1873, p. 79; N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1844, p. 14). The Connecticut antiquaries have mainly set forth the claims of their colony for leadership of the affair in the papers which constitute vol. i. (pp. 163-185) of the Conn. Hist. Soc. Collections, in which is the journal of Edward Mott,[625] the chairman of the Connecticut committee, edited by J. H. Trumbull.[626]

The part taken in the movement in Western Massachusetts arose from confidence reposed in Brown and others of Pittsfield, by the Connecticut men who passed through that town on their way to the New Hampshire Grants.[627] Brown had, during the previous winter, notified the Massachusetts committee that Ticonderoga would receive the attention of Ethan Allen and Green Mountain boys as soon as the outbreak came. The credit which attaches to this commander is complicated by the relations which Arnold bore to the final capture, and has in turn given rise to controversy. The most comprehensive examination of the question on the Vermont side is L. E. Chittenden's Addresses before the Vermont Historical Society, Oct., 1872 (published at Rutland by the society), and at the unveiling of Allen's statue at Burlington, July 4, 1873. We have Allen's own statements in his Narrative of his captivity, etc.[628]

Dawson thinks that the merit of originating the active measures cannot be taken from Benedict Arnold, and in his chapter (Battles of the United States, i. ch. 2) on the subject traces minutely the sources of each step in the progress of events, and in his Appendix (p. 38) prints the protest (May 10th, p. 38) of the Connecticut committee against Arnold's interference and Arnold's report (May 11th, p. 38) to the Massachusetts Congress.[629] There are some of the current reports preserved in Moore's Diary of the Amer. Revolution (i. pp. 78-80), and the account, which ignores Arnold, of the Worcester Spy (May 16th) is given in the Amer. Bibliopolist (1871, p. 491). There are other contemporary accounts in the American Archives (vols. ii. and iii.); a journal by Elmer is in the New Jersey Hist. Soc. Proc., vols. ii. and iii.; a Tory account in Jones's New York during the Revolutionary War (vol. i. pp. 47, 546), with a letter of May 14th.[630] Narratives by Caldwell and Beaman are in the Historical Magazine, August, 1867, and May, 1868, respectively.[631]

H. The Canada Campaign, 1775-1776.—Washington in New York, June 25th, entrusted to Schuyler the command in the North (Lossing's Schuyler, i. 330; Jones's N. Y. during the Rev. War, 58), and Congress issued (May 29, 1775) an address to the Canadians (Journal of Congress; Pitkin's United States, i. App. 19). In August it was reported that this address was left at the door of every house in Canada. Schuyler reached Ticonderoga July 18th (Lossing's Schuyler, i. ch. 21; Palmer's Lake Champlain, ch. 6; Irving's Washington, ii.), and pushed on to the foot of Lake Champlain in September (Lossing, i. ch. 23).

Among the early reports, inducing the project of invading Canada, were the letters of Maj. John Brown (Aug. 14, 1775) and Ethan Allen (Sept. 14th) respecting the condition of the Canadians (Sparks's Corresp. of the Rev., i. 461, 464). There are other letters on the state of Canada at this time in the N. H. Prov. Papers, vii. 515, 547, 561-62, 569. The Schuyler Papers, with the letters which they contain of Montgomery, Arnold, Wooster, and Sullivan, are a main source of information respecting the whole campaign.[632]

FROM THE ATLAS OF WILKINSON'S MEMOIRS.

A modern eclectic map is given in Carrington's Battles, 171. The most considerable contemporary map for the illustration of the movements during the Revolution in Canada is one published by Jefferys, in 1776, of the Province of Quebec, from the French Surveys and those made by Capt. Carver and others after the War, with much detail of names, plan of Quebec and heights of Abraham, Montreal and isles of Montreal (27 x 19 inches). On Feb. 16, 1776, Sayer and Bennett published in London A new map of the Province of Quebec according to the royal proclamation of 7 Oct., 1763, from the French surveys, corrected with those made after the war by Captain Carver and other officers in his majesty's service. There was a French reproduction of it in Paris in 1777, included in the Atlas Ameriquain (1778), called Nouvelle Carte de la Province de Quebec selon l'édit du Roi d'Angleterre du 7 8{bre}, 1763, par le Capitaine Carver, traduites de l'Anglois, à Paris chez le Rouge, 1777.

Jefferys also issued in 1775 An exact Chart of the River St. Lawrence from Fort Frontenac to Anticosti (37 X 24 inches), which is usually accompanied by a Chart of the Golf of St. Lawrence, 1775(24 X 20 inches). North Amer. Pilot, nos. 11, 20, 21, 22. There is in the Geschichte der Kriege in und ausser Europa [Nuremberg], 1776, a "Karte von der Insel Montreal und den Gegenden umher", following a plan by Bellin.

A map of Canada in 1774 is embraced in Mitchell's Map of the British Colonies, and in Wright's ed. of Cavendish's Debates in the Commons (1774) on the Canada bill, London, 1839. There are other maps in the American Atlas and Hilliard d'Auberteuil's Essais.

Schuyler's health preventing his taking the field in person, the interest in the campaign centres in Montgomery up to the time of his death.[633] We have despatches of his (Nov. 3, 1775) on the capture of St. Johns,[634] on the taking of Chamblée,[635] and on the capitulation of Montreal,[636] with his letters from before Quebec (Sparks, Corresp., i. 492, etc.). A letter from one of his aids at this time (Dec. 16, 1775) is in Life of George Read, p. 115.

The principal Life of Montgomery is that by J. Armstrong, in Sparks's Amer. Biography (i. p. 181), which may be supplemented by other minor accounts.[637]

The connection of Benedict Arnold with the Campaign is illustrated in his letters, beginning with those before he left the column advancing by Lake Champlain, and then following his progress on the expedition to coöperate by the Kennebec route, which Washington proposed to Schuyler in a letter of Aug. 20, 1775 (Sparks's Washington, iii. 63). On Sept. 14th Washington sealed his instructions to Arnold (Sparks, iii. 86; Dawson, 113; Henry's Journal, ed. 1877, p. 2). It is said that the route to be taken was suggested to Arnold by the journal of an exploration in that direction by Montresor in 1760.[638] That engineer had, by order of General Murray, made a survey of this route in 1761.[639] There are maps to illustrate Arnold's route in the Atlantic Neptune, London Mag., 1776, Marshall's Atlas to his Washington, and in the 1877 edition of Henry's Journal.[640] All the general histories and a few biographies and local records necessarily cover the story.[641] Arnold himself is the best contemporary authority.

CAPITULATION OF ST. JOHNS.

Fac-simile, slightly reduced, of the reproduction in Smith's Amer. Hist. and Lit. Curios., 2d series, p. xl., from the original in the collection of Ferdinand J. Dreer, of Philadelphia.

A number of his letters respecting the expedition are in Bowdoin College library,[642] and they and others will be found in print in the Maine Hist. Soc. Collections (1831), vol. i. 357, etc., and in Sparks's Corresp. of the Revolution, i. 46, 60, 88, 475, etc.[643] His journal of his progress is unfortunately rather meagre, and covers but a few weeks, Sept. 27 to Oct. 30, 1775. The original manuscript was left by Arnold at West Point when he fled, and extracts from it are printed in S. L. Knapp's Life of Aaron Burr, 1835; it is now owned by Mr. S. L. M. Barlow, of New York, and a copy, made from it when owned by Judge Edwards, of New York, is in the Sparks MSS. (lii. vol. ii.).

CONCLUSION AND ATTESTATION OF MONTGOMERY'S WILL.

Cf. Harper's Mag., vol. lxx. p. 356.

Various other journals of the actors in the expedition have been preserved.[644]

Arnold's letters at the Point-aux-Trembles and before Quebec are in Sparks's Corresp. of the Rev. (i. App.), together with those addressed to Wooster,[645] Schuyler, and Washington after the failure of the assault on Quebec, Dec. 31, 1775.[646]

MONTGOMERY.

After the only original portrait preserved at Montgomery Place, and representing him at about twenty-five. Cf. Harper's Mag., lxx. p. 350; Irving's Washington, illus. ed., vol. ii.

The study of Trumbull's well-known picture of "The Death of Montgomery" is on a card less than four inches square, now owned by Major Lewis, of Virginia, and is marked "J. Trumbull to Nelly Custis, 1790" (Johnston's Orig. Portraits of Washington, p. 72).

MONTGOMERY.

From An Impartial History of the War in America, vol. i. p. 392 (Boston), engraved by J. Norman. Cf. the engraving in Murray's Impartial Hist. of the Present War, ii. 193. Neither of these copper-plates are probably of any value as likenesses. They show the kind of effigy doing service at the time.

The great resource for original material on the siege of Quebec, beside the letters given by Sparks and Lossing, are in the gatherings of 4 Force's Archives, vols. iv., v., and vi.; Almon's Remembrancer, vol. ii.; N. Y. Col. Docs., viii. 663, etc.; and in a large number of diaries and other contemporary records, which may readily be classed as American or British, with a few emanating from the French Canadians.[647]

On Jan. 19, 1776, a report was made in Congress that the army in Canada be reinforced (Secret Journals, i. 241).

From an engraving of full length in An Impartial Hist. of the War in America, Lond. 1780, p. 249. A mezzotint similar to this was published in London, 1776, as "Col. Arnold, who commanded the provincial troops sent against Quebec" (J. C. Smith, Brit. Mez. Portraits, iv. 1714-1717). The portrait in profile, by W. Tate,—a handsome face,—was engraved in line by H. B. Hall in 1865, and etched by him in 1879 for Isaac N. Arnold's Life of B. Arnold. Cf. Jones's Campaign for the Conquest of Canada, p. 168. Other portraits of Arnold are given later in the present volume.

MONTRESOR'S MAP.

Sketched from the original (1760) among the Peter Force maps in the Library of Congress. There is a copy in the library of the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Society.

In April Arnold returned to Montreal, and Wooster took command before Quebec,[648] to be superseded by General Thomas, who reached the camp May 1st. Upon Carleton's being reinforced, Thomas began to retreat.[649] Burgoyne arrived with additional troops in June (Fonblanque's Burgoyne, 211). The affair at the Cedars took place May 19, 1776.[650] The movement against Three Rivers had been begun by orders of Thompson, who was in command upon the death of Thomas (June 2d), and remained so for a few days till Sullivan arrived.

From An Impartial History of the War in America, Lond., 1780, p. 400, where the cut represents his full length. Cf. prints published in London in 1776 (Brit. Mez. Portrait, by J. C. Smith); Hollister's Connecticut, i. 390; Jones's Campaign for the Conquest of Canada, 28; Geschichte der Kriege in und ausser Europa (Nürnberg, 1778).

Smith, in the St. Clair Papers, i. 17, collates the authorities on this movement,[651] calling in question the statements given by Bancroft.

Sullivan's Irish precipitancy and over-confidence did not mend matters as the retreat went on, and raised delusive hopes which were more welcome than Arnold's gloomy views.[652]

SIEGE OF QUEBEC, 1775-76.

Sketched from a manuscript plan noted in the Sparks Catalogue (p. 208), which belongs to Cornell University, and was kindly communicated to the editor. The original (18½ × 15 inches) is marked as "on a scale of 30 chaines to an Inch", and is signed "E. Antill ft." in the corner. Mr. Sparks has marked it "Siege of Quebec, 1776." It is endorsed on the outside, "Gen^l Arnold's plan of Quebec, with y^e Americans besieging it, y^e winter of 1776." It bears the following Key: "H, Headquarters. A, A, A, advanced guards. B, B, B, main guards. C, C, C, quarter guards. D, Capt. Smith's riflemen. E, cul-de-sac, where the men-of-war lay, F, governor's house. G, where all materials are carried to build our batteries, out of view of the town. I, lower town. K, the barrier, near which General Montgomery fell. K L, the dotted line shews the route the troops took under the general, thro' deep snow without any path." The dotted line in the river marks the extent of ice from the shore, and in the open stream are the words: "(Unfrose) Ice driving with y^e Tide." The roads are marked by broken lines – – – – – – –. The position of patrols are marked by the letter P.

The principal engraved map is a Plan of the city and environs of Quebec with its siege and blockage by the Americans from the 8th of December, 1775, to the 13th of May, 1776. Engraved by Wm. Faden, London; published 12 Sept., 1776. The original MS. draft is among the Faden maps (no. 20) in the library of Congress. There are other plans as follows: Mag. of Amer. Hist., April, 1884, p. 282; Leake's Life of Lamb, p. 130; Atlas to Marshall's Washington; Carrington's Battles, p. 138; Stone's Invasion of Canada, p. xvii.; a marginal plan in Sayer and Bennett's New Map of the Province of Quebec, published Feb. 16, 1776; and a German "Plan von Quebec" in the Geschichte der Kriege in und ausser Europa, Nuremberg, 1777, Dritter Theil. There is a marginal map of Quebec in an edition of Carver's map of the Province of Quebec, published by Le Rouge in Paris in 1777, and included in the Atlas Ameriquain (1778).

For views of Quebec and the points of attack, see Moore's Diary of the Rev., i. 185; Lossing's Field-Book, i. 198; and Mag. of Amer. Hist., April, 1884, p. 274. A view of the plains of Abraham is in Ibid., p. 296.

The retreat continued to Crown Point, and in July Sullivan was relieved by Gates; and the campaign was over,—nothing accomplished. On July 26th Governor Trumbull reviews the condition of the army in a letter in Hinman's Conn. during the Rev. (p. 560).[653] The letters of Ira Allen and John Hurd express the uneasy state of mind along the frontier, which now took possession of the exposed settlers (N. H. Prov. Papers, viii. pp. 301, 306, 311, 315-317, 405). Insecurity was felt at Ticonderoga (N. H. State Papers, viii. 576, 581).

Congress twice appointed commissioners to proceed towards Canada. In Nov., 1775, Robert R. Livingston, John Langdon, and Robert Treat Paine were sent, with instructions dated Nov. 8th,[654] to examine the fortifications of Ticonderoga and the highlands, and "to use their endeavors to procure an accession of the Canadians to a union with these colonies;" and their report (Nov. 17th), with a letter to Montgomery (Nov. 30th), is in the Sparks MSS. (lii. vol. ii.). In March, 1776, Benj. Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll were instructed (Journals of Congress, i. 289; Force, v. 411) to proceed to Canada to influence, if possible, the sympathies of the Canadians. Carroll was a Roman Catholic, and he was accompanied by his brother, John Carroll, a priest.[655] Much was expected of the mission on this account (Adams's Familiar Letters, 135). Franklin, delayed at Saratoga (April), began to feel that the exposures of the expedition were too much for one of his years, and sat down to write "to a few friends by way of farewell."[656] Carroll kept a diary, which has been since printed.[657] There are papers appertaining to the mission in Force's Archives, 4th, iv., v.; Sparks's Washington (iii. 390), and his Corresp. of the Rev. (i. 572), and Lossing's Schuyler (vol. ii.).[658] On Jan. 31, 1850, Mr. William Duane delivered an address on Canada and the Continental Congress before the Penna. Hist. Soc., which is printed among their occasional publications.

SULLIVAN'S ISLAND.

A part of a view published in London, August 10, 1776, and made by Lieut.-Col. Thomas James, of the Royal Regiment of Artillery. June 30, 1776. It represents the position of the fleet during "the attack on the 28th of June, which lasted nine hours and forty minutes." The position of the ships is designated by A, "Active", 28 guns; B, "Bristol", flag-ship, 50 guns; C, "Experiment", 50 guns; D, "Solebay", 28 guns. The "Syren", 28 guns, and "Acteon", 28 guns, and the "Thunder", bomb-ketch, were nearer the spectator as was the "Friendship", of 28 guns. L is Sullivan's Island; M, a narrow isthmus, defended by an armed hulk, N; the mainland is O; myrtle-grove, P.

Faden also issued at the same time, as made by Col. James, a long panoramic view of Sullivan's and Long islands, showing the American and British camps on the opposite sides of the dividing inlet.

Mr. Brantz Mayer's introduction to the Centennial ed. of Carroll's journal is largely concerned with the question of the Catholic pacification of Canada. Cf. Brent's Life of Archbishop Carroll; and B. W. Campbell's "Life and Times of Archbishop Carroll" in U. S. Cath. Mag., iii. The unfortunate comments (Oct. 21, 1774) of the Continental Congress on the Quebec Act was much against the persuasions of the commissioners, and it was soon evident that all their efforts, on this side at least, were futile. (Cf. Force's Am. Archives, ii. 231.)

After Franklin and John Carroll had left Montreal, Charles Carroll and Chase remained, endeavoring to support the military councils.[659]

I. The Attack on Sullivan's Island, June, 1776.—Clinton's proclamation to the magistrates of South Carolina, June 6, 1776, is in Ramsay's Revolution in South Carolina, i. 330. Lee's report to Washington (July 1, 1776) is in Sparks's Correspondence of the Revolution, i. 243; to Congress (July 2d), in Ibid., ii. 502; in Lee's Memoirs, p. 386; in Force's American Archives, 5th ser., i. p. 435; N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1872, pp. 100, 107; and in Dawson (p. 139). John Adams (Familiar Letters, 203) notes the exhilaration which the news caused in Philadelphia.

There are other contemporary accounts in Gen. Morris's letter in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1875, p. 438; in R. W. Gibbes's Doc. Hist. of the Amer. Rev., 1776-1782, pp. 2-19; in Force's Archives; in Frank Moore's Diary of the Rev., i. p. 257; in Moore's Laurens Correspondence, p. 24. A "new war song" of the day, referring to the battle, is given in Moore's Songs and Ballads of the Rev., p. 135. A broadside account was printed in Philadelphia, June 20, 1776 (Hildeburn's Bibliog., no. 3342). A plan of the attack after a London original was published in Philadelphia in 1777, with a "Description of the attack in a letter from Sir Peter Parker to Mr. Stephens, and an extract from a letter of Lieut. Gen. Clinton to Lord Geo. Germaine" (Hildeburn, no. 3539).

CHARLESTOWN, S. C., AND THE BRITISH FLEET, JUNE 29, 1776.

After a print published in London by Faden, August 10, 1776, taken by Lieut.-Col. James, the day after the fight.

Key.—A, Charlestown; B, Ashley River; C, Fort Johnston; D, Cummins Point; E, part of Five-Fathom Hole, where all the fleet rode before and after the attack; F, station of the headmost frigate, the "Solebay", two miles and three quarters from Fort Sullivan, situated to the northward of G; H, part of Mt. Pleasant; I, part of Hog Island; K, Wando River; L, Cooper River; M, James Island; N, breakers on Charlestown Bar; O, rebel schooner of 12 guns.

There is "An exact prospect of Charlestown, the metropolis of South Carolina", in the London Mag., 1762, a folding panoramic view, which shows the water-front with ships in the harbor.

The earliest general account is by Moultrie himself in his Memoirs of the American Revolution. Cf. Gordon's Amer. Rev.; and John Drayton's Memoirs of the American Revolution [through 1776] as relating to the State of South Carolina (Charleston, 1821, two vols.). Of the later general historians, reference may be made to Bancroft (orig. ed.), vol. viii. ch. 66, and final revision, iv. ch. xxv., a full account; to Dawson, i. ch. 10, to Carrington, ch. 27, 28; to Gay, iii. 467; Irving's Washington, ii. ch. 29; Lossing's Field-Book, ii. p. 754. Something can be gleaned from Garden's Anecdotes of the Revolution; Memoirs of Elkanah Watson; the life of Rutledge in Flanders's Chief Justices; and from such occasional productions as William Crafts's address (1825), included in his Miscellanies; Porcher's address in the South Carolina Hist. Coll., vol. i.; C. C. Jones, Jr.'s address on Sergeant Jasper in 1876, and the Centennial Memorial of that year and the paper in Harper's Monthly, xxi. 70, by T. D. English.

On the British side we have Parker's despatch (July 9th) in Dawson, p. 140; a letter of Clinton (July 8th) in the Sparks MSS., no. lviii.; Clinton's Observations on Stedman's History; the reports in the Gent. Mag. and Annual Register; the early historical estimate in Adolphus's England, ii. 346. Jones, New York in the Revolutionary War, i. 98, gives the Tory view. There is a contemporary letter by a British officer given in Lady Cavendish's Admiral Gambier, copied in Hist. Mag., v. 68. Hutchinson (Life and Diary, ii. 92) records the effects of the fight in England.[660]

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