Fighting for Independence

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which governed the state in defiance and often met in Concord, had instructed militias throughout the colony to form companies of at least 50 men, “who shall equip and hold themselves in readiness on the shortest notice to march.” To warn those so-called minutemen, a Committee of Safety led by physician and ardent revolutionary Joseph Warren monitored British troop movements in Boston. Warren was eager to fight for independence—liberty, he declared on the two-year anniversary of the Boston Massacre, was “far dearer than life.”

On April 14, 1775, Lt. Gen. Thomas Gage, the royal governor of Massachusetts and commander of some 4,000 troops in Boston, received a letter from the king’s colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth. The missive indicated that it was better to challenge the “rude rabble” of defiant colonists immediately than wait until they might be “in a riper state of rebellion.” Gage knew he would be facing determined militiamen, yet he resolved to try to nip the revolt in the bud. Four days later, Gage dispatched about 700 troops to furtively travel overnight and destroy rebel munitions stored at Concord, 20 miles west of Boston. 

Warren knew where the British intended to strike—and on April 18, he dispatched two couriers to warn people along the way that the British were coming. Tanner William Dawes, Jr., known for wearing disguises to pass British lines, rode horseback by land across the narrow neck of the Boston peninsula. The versatile Paul Revere—silversmith, engraver, and spy—ensured two lanterns were lit in the belfry of Boston’s Christ Church (later Old North Church) to signal that the troops  were advancing by water. He then mounted up in Charleston and rode toward Lexington.

Revere arrived there 30 minutes before Dawes did and alerted Samuel Adams and John Hancock—who had fled Boston to avoid arrest—that soldiers were approaching. Revere was eventually captured, but the rebel warnings enabled Capt. John Parker, who was suffering from tuberculosis, to assemble minutemen on Lexington Common several hours ahead of the British vanguard. But when hundreds of highly trained British infantrymen arrived at dawn, only about 75 militiamen, ranging in age from 16 to 66, had responded quickly enough to confront them.

A shot rang out—the “shot heard round the world”—though who fired it is still unknown. But it triggered the first clash of the Revolutionary War. Ten Massachusetts militiamen were wounded and eight killed. More might have perished, but the British commander, Col. Francis Smith, whose men emerged largely unscathed, called a halt to “all further slaughter of those deluded people.”

By the time Smith’s troops reached Concord, minutemen were approaching by the hundreds to swell the town’s defenses. Many of them gathered on a hill on the far side of North Bridge over the Concord River. From that vantage point, the oncoming British, lit by the morning sun, “made a noble appearance in their red coats,” minuteman Thaddeus Blood recalled, but they were less impressive to behold when they began ransacking the town for munitions, most of which had been moved elsewhere. Some of them burned gun carriages and other debris, and the fire spread. Men on the hill thought they were deliberately torching Concord. “Will you let them burn the town down?” Lt. Joseph Hosmer asked Col. James Barrett, whose home was among those searched. At Barrett's order, minutemen descended on North Bridge and repulsed British troops there before halting short of Concord, where the fire had been extinguished. One redcoat reportedly had his skull split by a soldier wielding a hatchet, contributing to a rumor that American fighters were scalping their victims. 

When the skirmish subsided, Smith led troops back to Boston, only to encounter fierce opposition along the way. On a hill west of town, the tubercular Captain  Parker gathered Lexington militiamen eager to avenge their earlier defeat. They greeted the British with a volley that wounded Smith. Retreating redcoats panicked under fire from rebels stationed behind rocks and trees. “We began to run rather than retreat in order,” Ensign Henry DeBerniere recalled. Substantial reinforcements led by Brig. Gen. Hugh Percy steadied the British, however, and blasted the houses from which snipers were firing.

The battle continued that afternoon as more militiamen joined the fray. Some were overwhelmed by British flanking parties that moved forward on either side of the road to clear them out. At Menotomy (later Arlington, Massachusetts), beleaguered militiamen sought refuge in the house of farmer Jason Russell, who was shot, bayoneted, and killed on his doorstep. A dozen others died in and around the house, along with two redcoats.

British casualties increased as they withdrew under what Percy called “an incessant fire, which like a moving circle, surrounded and followed us wherever we went.” By the time they reached Boston, 273 British soldiers had been killed or wounded, or were missing—nearly three times the casualties of the Americans. “The whole country was assembled in arms with surprising expedition,” Gage wrote of his opponents, “and several thousand are now assembled about this town threatening an attack and getting up artillery.”

On May 25, 1775, just weeks before the Continental Congress elevated George Washington to commander in chief, three British major generals who would figure prominently in the war—William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne—disembarked in Boston to advise Gage. Howe, who had led the British forces that captured Québec in 1759, was the senior officer under Gage and played a central part in plans to seize two strategic points overlooking Boston that could threaten British forces if occupied by rebels: Dorchester Heights to the south and Bunker Hill to the north.

Word of the offensive, planned for June 18, leaked well in advance to the rebel Committee of Safety, whose agents remained active around Boston. Many residents had fled the city, but some remained. The Reverend Andrew Eliot lamented the sad state of “this once populous and flourishing place, shops and warehouses shut up … and everyone in anxiety and distress.” Militiamen crowded surrounding towns like Cambridge, which served as the headquarters of Maj. Gen. Artemas Ward—a veteran, like Washington, of the French and Indian War. Charged with fortifying Bunker Hill, Ward assigned the task to Col. William Prescott.

On June 16, Prescott led about a thousand colonial troops from Cambridge to Bunker Hill, which they reached that night. After lengthy deliberation with his officers, he decided against their orders to fortify the 110-foot-high hill and instead chose to defend nearby Breed’s Hill, which was only 75 feet high and situated closer to the harbor where British warships lurked and British troops would soon land. Overnight, the militiamen excavated a small earthen redoubt. At dawn the next day, cannonballs fired by British naval gunners crashed down on the dirt fort, beheading one soldier and terrifying others. Prescott reassured them by waving his hat at the distant gunners and shouting, “Hit me if you can.” He then set the men to work building a defensive line to the left of the fort to deter a flank attack. 

By midday, the line had extended along a rail fence to Mystic River, where newly arrived New Hampshire militiamen led by Col. John Stark raised a stone wall on the beach. The barrier proved critical when Howe crossed that afternoon from Boston with more than 2,000 troops. Howe sent light infantry—elite companies trained to set out swiftly and overwhelm defenders—against the wall with bayonets fixed to their muskets. If Stark’s men had fired at long range, as nervous soldiers often did, their foes might have suffered few casualties and poured over the wall. But Stark had placed a marker about 40 yards from the barrier, and his troops unleashed devastating volleys at that distance. 

Meanwhile, British grenadiers—named for the powder-filled hand grenades they once carried—charged the rail fence with similarly grim results. Those assault troops were large men and formidable in close combat, but they made prominent targets as they waded uphill through thick grass in their bearskin caps.

After two futile charges depleted Howe’s forces, he received reinforcements,  and his troops now advanced in narrow, deep columns that proved hard to stop. The rebel defenders started to run low on ammunition. “Our firing began to slacken,” one of them recalled, “and at last it went out like an old candle.” As redcoats entered the redoubt, Prescott called for retreat.

By day’s end, the British held Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill, but casualties were staggeringly high: At least 1,000 of their men lay dead or wounded—more than twice the American toll. “Our loss has been very great,” wrote British major general Clinton, who described the victory as “dear bought" and added, “another such would have ruined us.” 

On June 19, 1775, the Second Continental Congress commissioned George Washington as general and commander in chief of the newly formed “army of the United Colonies,” later known as the Continental Army. When accepting the appointment, Washington remarked that “my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important trust.” He had never commanded such a large force.

When Washington took charge of some 16,000 militiamen outside Boston in July, he knew that molding what he called an “effective army” would take time. Militiamen had shown they could fight hard, but they were undisciplined and sometimes took leave without permission. Many elected their own officers, whose efforts to “curry favor with the men” left the soldiers less obedient and respectful of authority than Washington deemed “necessary to support a proper command.”

Several dozen Black militiamen had fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill. One of them, Salem Poor of Massachusetts, who had purchased his freedom as a young man in 1769, was commended afterward as a “brave and gallant soldier” who fought with the composure of “an experienced officer.” Washington initially barred Black troops from serving in the army he was forming—only reversing his order after Virginia’s royal governor issued a proclamation in late 1775 that offered freedom to men enslaved or held as indentured servants by rebels if they would fight for the British.

While his army was taking shape, Washington ruled out attacking the British in Boston and instead besieged the city. Wielding picks and shovels rather than muskets, soldiers dug trenches and raised formidable breastworks around Boston’s landward side. Howe, who took command when Gage departed in October and had not forgotten the carnage on Breed’s Hill, heeded those fortifications and sat tight. 

With no battle imminent, Washington sent Col. Henry Knox to retrieve cannons, mortars, and ammunition from Fort Ticonderoga, which had been captured by Col. Benedict Arnold alongside Col. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. Knox had sleds constructed to haul nearly 60 big guns, some of them weighing a ton or more, across Massachusetts over snow and ice. 

Temporarily stalled by a year-end thaw, Knox’s sleds reached Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge in late January 1776. Following elaborate preparations, 400 oxen hauled the artillery up the slopes of Dorchester Heights on the night of March 4, and the British awoke to find rebel gunners in a position to “command the whole town,” one officer wrote. Howe decided against risking another bloody clash like Bunker Hill. On March 17 a fleet withdrew his army to Halifax in Canada, and Washington secured Boston without a battle.

Two weeks after the British departed, Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, who was serving in Congress at Philadelphia, that a welcome, if temporary, “peace” had descended on Boston. In correspondence with her husband, she served as his confidant, critic, and adviser, encouraging him and other leaders to expand their conception of liberty. A staunch abolitionist, she questioned some Patriots’ devotion to freedom when they deprived “fellow Creatures of theirs.” And she hoped that if Congress declared independence and wrote new laws, it would “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

"Remember all men would be tyrants if they could,” she noted. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”