Had Boston town gone under in flame and terror, the very fury of the catastrophe might
have carried men through it with less of despair than this cold conquest. Instead of blows to be struck, or blood to be shed, there was only humiliation—humiliation intensified hourly by the cool, unimpassioned correctness with which the enemy treated the fallen city.
He did not even fill the city with troops. Only four thousand infantry and a regiment of cavalry were sent in to hold all Boston. The rest of the army remained outside, encamped or quartered on the people of the suburbs and the towns of the metropolitan district.
Unconcerned Conquerors
Unconcerned, almost unguarded, the commander and his officers moved about the town. They went in and out of the City Hall with the assurance of superiors. They occupied the two largest hotels. Brookline people reported that the Country Club there had been turned into a brigade headquarters.
Dazed, as if in the bonds of an ugly nightmare that must vanish if they could only awaken, the people of Boston looked at this handful of men who had so easily, so calmly, made themselves utter masters of a metropolitan district of 39 municipalities—13 cities and 26 towns all within fifteen miles of the State House. From the State House this dozen or two dozen quiet, business-like men in uniform ruled with a word or two over 415 square miles with a population of more than a million and a half of people, and a taxable value of more than two and one-half billions of dollars.[112]
In the city so helplessly given over to them, there were, according to the certificate then lying in the City Clerk’s office, 124,000 men liable to enrollment in the State Militia. These were part of those “millions of men” of whom passionate orators had spoken so often—the millions of heroic, strong, intelligent American freemen who would instantly spring to arms at the call of need and sweep the most daring invader back into the sea.[113]
They were heroic. They were strong. They were intelligent. But they were confronted by the cold truth. It stared at them from all their squares, from all their parks, from the approaches to all their bridges. It was the cold truth—in the shape of cannon. Even the grounds of Harvard and of Boston University were occupied by batteries. Sentinels were on watch in Boston’s church towers with machine guns that pointed down into the streets.