They reached Lexington Common at two o’clock, quite overcome with fatigue. There they were met by one thousand two hundred fresh troops, under Lord Percy, whose timely arrival saved the entire force from capture. Lord Percy’s men formed a square for the protection of the retreating soldiers, and into it they staggered, falling upon the ground, “with their tongues hanging out of their mouths like those of dogs after a chase.”
After resting for an hour, the British again took up their march to Boston. The minutemen, increasing in numbers every moment, kept up the same kind of running attack that they had made between Concord and Lexington until, late in the day, the redcoats came under the protection of the guns of the war vessels in Boston Harbor.
The British had failed. There was no denying that. They had been driven back, almost in a panic, to Boston, with a loss of nearly three hundred men. The Americans had not lost one hundred.
But the King was not aroused to the situation. He had a vision of his superb regiments in their brilliant uniforms overriding all before them.
And how did the Provincials, as the British called the Americans, regard the situation? They saw clearly and without glamour the deadly nature of the struggle upon which they had entered and the strength of the opposing army against which they must measure their own strength.
The people of Massachusetts for miles around Boston were now in a state of great excitement. Farmers, mechanics, men in all walks of life flocked to the army, and within a few days the Americans, sixteen thousand strong, were surrounding the British in Boston.
While the people of Massachusetts were in the midst of these stirring scenes, an event of deep meaning to all the colonies was taking place in Philadelphia. Here the Continental Congress, coming together for the second time, was making plans for carrying on the war by voting money for war purposes and by making George Washington commander-in-chief of the Continental army, of which the troops around Boston were the beginning. Thus did the colonies recognize that war had come and that they must stand together in the fight.
President Langdon, the President of Harvard College, Praying for the Bunker Hill Entrenching Party on Cambridge Common Just Before Their Departure.
Meantime more British troops, under the command of General Howe, arrived in Boston, making an army of ten thousand men. Believing they could be forced to leave the town by cannon planted on Bunker Hill, the Americans decided to occupy it.