Within Boston all of Gage’s forces, numbering three thousand English, Scotch, and Irish regulars, with many hired Hessians and Waldeckers, now retired; while twenty thousand very irregulars, farmers’ boys, and mechanics, with John Stark in his bear-skin coat, Israel Putnam in leather apron, and other leaders, drawn by centripetal patriotism from their ill-supplied homes, and in such accoutrements as old family chests yielded up, assembled in a tumultuous crowd at the American camp, and formed a weak line around the land side of the city. While this cord was thus stretched on the weak side of Boston,—if, indeed, she ever had a weak side,—George Washington, then forty-three years old, hitherto pursuing the double business of farmer and surveyor, overlaying both ever with the cultured ease and polish of a high-bred gentleman, already known to military men on both sides the sea by his practical capacity in their science, evinced in Braddock’s march and defeat, confessedly a large-headed, well-balanced, wise man, and of intense personal courage and patriotism, was, on the 17th June, 1775, appointed Commander-in-Chief. No statelier figure than his—over six feet in height as it was, and cased ordinarily in large, roomy buckskin trousers, a handsomely fitting blue coat and buff vest—was seen at any time in the American camp for the next eight years.
About the same time the British troops under Gage were reinforced, until they counted twelve thousand veterans. Gage, however, did not long swing on the military tree, or remain to be shaken from the Boston bough by the Yankee farmers and mechanics. He was superseded by Sir William Howe, who, in a few days after Washington’s appointment, landed at Boston, accompanied by Sir Henry Clinton and General Burgoyne.
Believing that what cometh out of the mouth is more hurtful than what enters it, the American army now seized Boston Neck tightly. This contraction produced some spasms in the apoplectic-looking, newly arrived Englishmen, who moved galvanically towards Bunker’s Hill, on the opposite side of the city. To this point Colonel Prescott, with one thousand men,—including some negroes,—was despatched; and here, as is well known, he and Warren and their little party-colored regiment did such things, June 17, 1775, to General Howe and his three thousand attacking men, reinforced by Clinton during the day, as have been deemed worthy of much speaking about ever since.
The brow of Bunker Hill received that day, where Warren and others fell, a scar which not even the hard monumental patch since imposed upon it can make us wish to forget. Higher praise of that scar we cannot accumulate.
While these patriotic doings were going on around Boston, movements equally patriotic were pushed forward in an entirely new quarter,—movements, in fact, which resulted in hiring the coachman of the Sun to drive for the future an American emigrant wagon-train, in company with the old Western solar line. Daniel Boone, then in his forty-fifth year, having four years before blazed a-way with his rifle through the woods from North Carolina across the Cumberland Mountains to the river of the same name, led out in May, 1775, a boon company, founding a Colony on the Kentucky River, at first called Transylvania, but which subsequently threw off, with its hunting-shirt, this long Latinized cognomen, and stood at the dewy font to receive the dear old name of Kentucky. The little Colony started on good wholesome diet,—religious toleration; representatives elected by the people, from the people, for the people; and taxation only by their own representatives. Sheltered by its seclusion from the now daily swelling insurrection on the Atlantic coasts, the riflemen’s settlement grew apace, picking up its flints from the primeval rocks which propped up the neighboring Alleghany range, but pecking them for use only upon abundant game that hovered over its dinner-pots and sauce-pans, ready to drop into them at proper signals.
Washington reviews the Troops at Cambridge.
(p. 251)
In July, 1775, Washington went on to Cambridge and took charge of the Continental forces. These forces were, it is well known, about as unmanageable as those at work in volcanic mountains, sometimes making an ominous rumbling, sometimes erupting awkwardly for the peace of others near them, and occasionally discharging themselves most inconveniently for those whose duty it was to watch them. The hot patriotic principles, however, of these raw, unscored militia materials helped essentially the warm endeavors of Washington, Gates, Ward, and Lee to season them into tough disciplined, serviceable timber, and so to support loads and resist strains. In a few months even the most unpromising sticks were dry enough to be piled up around Boston, and thus to burn out General Howe.
Following the old colonial habit of casting sheep’s-eyes upon Canada whenever the dogs of war were unkennelled, that shepherd dog, Ethan Allen, scented game at Crown Point, on the western side of Lake Champlain. Bounding away in long leaps, without a whine or a howl to indicate his purpose or direction, he suddenly sprang upon the British flocks quietly feeding there, and effectually penned and secured them. Hardly stopping to be petted for this exploit, the brave colly tore off, with only a small pack of eighty, to Montreal; but the British keepers there, apprised of his approach, managed, as he came up near the folds, to seize him, put a collar around his neck, and to send him to England, where, however, he never would hunt with the royal pack.
General Montgomery was more fortunate; for within a month after, having taken St. John’s and Fort Chambly, he followed the footprints of Allen, and captured Montreal. Leaving about two hundred troops in that island city,—now the crowning jewel in the Anglo-American stomacher,—he pushed down the St. Lawrence, and at a point twenty miles above Quebec, absorbing the detachment of six hundred men led by the bold, dashing, unprincipled Arnold, he advanced upon the citadel of English America. Here in front of Quebec, after battling the cold for four weeks, the gallant Irishman, on the last day of 1775, amidst a storm of snow and of pelting iron hail, led on a vigorous assault against the place where, sixteen years before, in company with the brave Wolfe, he had gathered the bright laurels of victory, unmixed, as was not his commander’s,—with the gloomy cypress. Now the cypress was all that he was destined to grasp from the grim rock which resented a second capture by the same mortal.