An English ministry and an English king were convinced that everything necessary to do for the suppression of the mutinous spirit in a turbulent but unwarlike people had been done. The existence of Boston as a trading port had been abolished; Carthage had been blotted out; there was an English army within the walls of Boston; there was an English fleet in the Charles River. Who could doubt that the cowardly farmers whom Sandwich derided, and their leaders, the voluble lawyers whom Sandwich despised, would be cowed now into quiescence, only thankful that things were no worse? The best and wisest in England were among those who did doubt, but they were like Benedict in the play—nobody marked them, or at least nobody responsible for any control over the conduct of affairs. Official confidence was suddenly and rudely shaken. The lawyers proved to be men of deeds as well as of words. The disdained farmers showed that the descendants of the men who had fought with beasts and with Indians after the manner of Endicott and Standish had not degenerated in the course of a few generations. Over the Atlantic came news which made the Boston Massacre, the burning of the "Gaspee," and the Boston Tea-party, seem trivial and insignificant events. An astounded Ministry learned that a formal Congress of Representatives of the different colonies had been convened and had met in Philadelphia, and had drawn up a Declaration of Rights. Chatham admired and applauded their work. To the King and the King's ministers it was meaningless when it was not offensive. But the colonists showed that they could do more than meet in Congresses and draw up {174} splendid State Papers. The next news was of acts of war. Gage schemed a raid upon the stores of powder and arms accumulated by the disaffected colonists in Concord. Warning of his plan was carried at night by a patriotic engraver named Paul Revere to every hamlet within reach of a horse's ride. There was a skirmish at Lexington on the road to Concord between the King's troops and a body of minute-men, which resulted in the killing and wounding of many of the latter and the dispersal of their force. An expedition that began with what might in irony be termed a victory for the British arms ended in a disaster as tragic as it was complete. Concord forewarned had nothing to yield to the English soldiers who invaded her quiet streets; but the surrounding country, equally forewarned, answered the invasion by sending bodies of armed farmers and minute-men from every point of the compass to the common centre of Concord. There was a sharp, short fight on Concord Bridge, which ended in the repulse of the royal troops and the death of brave men on both sides. Then the British officer decided to retreat from Concord. It proved one of the most memorable retreats in history. From behind every tree, every bowlder, every wall, every hedge, enemies trained in the warfare of the wilderness poured their fire upon the retiring troops. It seemed to one of the officers engaged in that memorable fight as if the skies rained down foes upon them, unseen foes only made known by the accuracy of their marksmanship and the pertinacity of their veiled pursuit. All the way from Concord the retiring troops fought in vain with an enemy that was seldom seen, but whose presence was everywhere manifested by the precision of his aim and the tale of victims that followed each volley. The retreat was becoming a rout when reinforcements sent out from Boston under the command of Lord Percy stayed an actual stampede. But it could not stay the retreat nor avert defeat. Lord Percy, who had marched out with his bands playing "Yankee Doodle," in mockery of the Americans, had to retreat in his turn with no mocking music, carrying with him the remnant of the invaders of Concord. He {175} and his force did not get within touch of Boston and the protection of the guns of the fleet a moment too soon. Had a large body of insurgents, who came hurrying in to help their brethren, arrived on the field a little earlier, Lord Percy and his command must inevitably have been made prisoners of war. As it was, this one day's business had given success and the confidence that comes of success to the raw colonists, and had inflicted a crushing defeat upon a body of soldiers who had been led to believe that the sight of their scarlet coats would act like a charm to tame their untutored opponents.
[Sidenote: 1776—Military success of the colonists]
Gage only recovered from the shock of this disaster to realize that Boston was invested by an insurgent army. The victors of the fight and flight from Concord were rapidly reinforced by bodies of men from all parts of the country; their ranks were hourly swelled by levies roughly armed but stubbornly resolved. Unpleasant facts forced themselves thick and fast upon Gage's notice. But yesterday, as it were, he had imagined that the mere presence of the forces under his command was sufficient to overawe the colonists and settle any show of insubordination forever; to-day he had to swallow in shame and anger a staggering defeat. Still Gage did nothing and his enemies accumulated. Royal reinforcements arrived under Burgoyne, Clinton, and Howe, to do nothing in their turn. But the peasants they despised were not idle and would not allow them to be idle. The English general woke up one morning to find that under cover of night an important point of vantage overlooking the town of Boston had been occupied and roughly fortified by the rebels. The citizen soldiers who had gathered together to defend their liberties had stolen a march upon the English general. They had occupied the rising ground of Breed Hill, below Bunker's Hill, on the Charlestown side of the Charles River, and had hurriedly intrenched themselves there behind rude but efficient earthworks. Gage was resolved that the rebels should not remain long in their new position. Chance might have allotted them a scratch victory over a small body of men taken unawares in unfamiliar country {176} and by unfamiliar methods of fighting. But here was a business familiar to the British soldier; here was work that he did well and that he loved to do. If the colonists really believed that they could hold Breed Hill against troops with whom the taking by storm of strong positions was a tradition, so much the worse for them. The order was given that the rebels must be cleared away from Breed Hill at once, and the welcome task was given to Lord Howe, in command of the flower of the forces in Boston. It is probable that Howe felt some pity for the rash and foolhardy men whose hopes it was his duty and his determination to destroy. Confident that the enterprise would be as brief as it must be decisive, Howe prepared to assault, and the battle of Breed Hill began.
[Sidenote: 1775—The Battle of Breed Hill]
The Breed Hill battle is one of the strangest and one of the bravest fights ever fought by men. On the one side were some hundreds of simple citizens, civilians, skilled as individuals in the use of the gun, and accustomed as volunteers, militia, and minute-men to something that might pass for drill and manoeuvre, officered and generalled by men who, like Warren and Greene, knew warfare only by the bookish theoric, or by men who, like Putnam and Pomeroy, had taken their baptism of fire and blood in frontier struggles with wild beast and wilder Indian. On the other side were some thousands of the finest troops in the world, in whose ranks victory was a custom, on whose banners the names of famous battles blazed. They were well trained, well armed, well equipped. They moved at the word of command with the monotonous precision and perfection of a machine. They were led by officers whose temper had been tested again and again in the sharp experiences of war, men to whom the thought of defeat was as unfamiliar as the thought of fear. The contrast between the two opposing forces was vividly striking in the very habiliments of the opponents. The men who were massed behind the breastworks of Breed Hill were innocent of uniform, of the bright attire that makes the soldier's life alluring, innocent even of any distinction between officer and private, or, if the words seem too formal {177} for so raw a force, between the men who were in command and the men who were commanded. The soldiers who were massed below, the force whose duty it was to march up the hill and sweep away the handful in hodden gray and black broadcloth who held it, glittered with all the bravery of color dear to the British army. Splendid in scarlet and white and gold, every buckle shining, every belt and bandolier as brightly clean as pipeclay could make it, the little army under Howe's command would have done credit to a parade in the Park or a field day at Windsor. The one side was as sad and sombre as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and warmth of a military pageant. The holders of the hill had come from their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among them came in the decent civic suits they wore behind their desks or counters. Few men's weapons were fellows in that roughly armed array. Each militant citizen carried his own gun, some favorite weapon, familiar from long practice in fowling, or from frequent service further afield against the bear, the panther, and the wolf. Some of the flint-locks were enormously long; many of them would have seemed extremely old-fashioned to an ordnance officer. But every gun was like an additional limb to those practised marksmen, who knew little of firing in platoons, but everything of the patient accuracy which gives the backwoodsman his unerring aim. The assailants carried the latest weapons approved of by the War Office, and manipulated them with the faultless unison and unswerving harmony that would have compelled the compliments of a commander-in-chief at a review. At the top of the hill were some sixteen hundred men, a mob of undisciplined sharpshooters, few of whom had ever fired a shot in organized warfare. At the bottom of the hill were some four thousand of the finest troops in the world, stiffened with all the strength that prestige and practice could give them. It did not seem on the face of it a very equal combat; it did not seem to the English generals that it ought to take very long to {178} march from the bottom to the top of the hill and make short work of the mutinous peasants on its summit. The best indeed that the mutinous peasants could hope for when the British were upon them was to be shot or bayoneted as quickly as possible, for the terms of Gage's proclamation directly threatened with the gallows every rebel taken with arms in his hands.
But at Breed Hill, as at Concord, the unexpected came to pass. The British troops were unable to endure the destructive fire of the colonists. Again and again they advanced over the incline as calmly as if on parade; again and again they reeled backward with shattered ranks, leaving grim piles of dead upon the fire-swept slope. The execution was terrible; regiments that marched up the hill as if to certain victory fell back from it a mere remnant of themselves, leaving most of their men and almost all their officers behind. For awhile the fight was a succession of catastrophes to the force under Howe's command. It looked as if Breed Hill would never be taken. But there came a time when the men who held it could hold it no longer. Their supply of powder began to run out, and with their means of keeping up their fire their power of holding their position came to an end. Then came a last charge of Howe's rallied forces, this time in the lightest of marching array, a last volley from behind the earth-works, and Breed Hill was in the hands of the British. It was captured at the last without much bloodshed, without much loss to its garrison. The smoke hung so thick about the enclosure where the rebels had held their own so long and so well that it was not easy for the bayonets of the conquerors to do much execution, and the defenders of Breed Hill slipped away for the most part under cover of the mist they themselves had made. Indeed, there was little inclination for pursuit on the part of the victors. They had done what they had been set to do, but they had done it at a cost which for the time made it impossible for them to attempt to pursue an advantage so dearly bought. They did not, could not know the strength of their enemy; they were content to hold the ground which had been won {179} with such a fearful waste of British blood. Breed Hill was a nominal victory for the King; it was a real victory for the rebels, who had shown what an undisciplined force, composed of farmers, trappers, lawyers, shopkeepers, and divines, could do against the finest troops in the world.
[Sidenote: 1775—The Continental Army]
Already insurgent America had an army, and an army of investment. The rebels, whom Gage affected to despise almost as much as he was himself despised by General Burgoyne, were massed in numbers unknown to the loyalists before Boston, and the English soldiers were cooped up in the city they had crossed the seas to command. The colonial army was rude and rough, but earnest and resolute, and it had evolved generals of its own making, rough and rude as itself, but able, daring, and fearless. Israel Putnam, who killed a wolf once with his own hands in his wild youth, gripping it by the throat till he had choked its life out, had come to fight against the flag beneath which he had fought so well in the French wars. Nathaniel Greene had flung down his military books and caught up the sword, had abandoned the theory for the practice, and was beginning to make a name. Benedict Arnold, after a life as varied, as shady, and as adventurous as that of any picaroon in a Spanish story, leaped into fame as a daring spirit by the way in which he and Ethan Allen, at the head of a mixed force of Vermonters and New Englanders, had taken Fort Ticonderoga, on the great lakes, by surprise, and had endowed the dawning army with its captured cannon. Prescott, the hero of Breed Hill, was now a veteran soldier; and the names of Artemas Ward, of Schuyler, of Pomeroy, Heath and Thomas, Sullivan and Montgomery, Wooster and Spencer were becoming more than mere names to Englishmen in Boston and in London. Two Englishmen held rank as generals in the crude colonial army—the adventurer Charles Lee, whom some foolish people believed to be the real Junius, and Horatio Gates. There were few thoroughly worthless men in the young army, but it is painful to record that Lee and Gates were eminent among them. These were the generals of what was now to be called the {180} Continental Army. Happy in most of them, happy in much, it was happiest of all in this: that it had for its commander-in-chief the noblest man, who was to prove the greatest soldier, then living in the world.
[Sidenote: 1775—George Washington]
When Braddock died, the hero of a hopeless fight and the martyr of his own folly, the funeral service was read over his body by the young Virginian soldier who had fought by his side and had warned him against his rashness. To men in later years there seemed to be something prophetic, with the blended irony and pathos of prophecy, in the picture of that dead Englishman, his scarlet coat torn and bloody with so many wounds, lying in his grave while his American lieutenant read over him the words that committed so much wasted courage to the earth. At the time and hour the thing signified no more than the price of a petty victory of allied French and Indians, which the Virginian soldier was soon to avenge. After planting the banner of King George on the ruins of Fort Duquesne, Captain Washington sheathed his sword and retired from military into civil life, with as little likelihood as desire of ever carrying arms again. All he asked and all he anticipated was to live the tranquil life of a comfortable colonial gentleman. After a youth that had been vexed by many experiences of the passion of love he had married happily and wisely, and had settled down to a gracious rural life at Mount Vernon, on the banks of the Potomac River. He wished no better than to be a country gentleman, with a country gentleman's pleasures and pursuits—farming, hunting, fishing—with a country gentleman's friendships for neighbors like himself. He was a dutiful servant of his State; he was a member of the Virginia Houses of Burgesses for fifteen years after the fall of Fort Duquesne, and though he seldom played any part in debate he commanded the confidence and the esteem of his colleagues and of his fellow-citizens. He lived and enjoyed a peaceful, honorable, useful, uneventful life, and might have lived it to its end in dignified obscurity if a rash and headstrong sovereign over-seas had not found ministers too servile or too foolish to say him nay.