The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [18]
Greenwood’s efforts to see her again, and to reunite with his father, were thwarted because of the travel prohibitions. What the teenaged soldier did not realize, however, was that his mother was right there in Cambridge. On the day before Bunker Hill, when he last saw her, Mrs. Greenwood had obtained a pass from the British to visit the American camp to search for her son, whom she heard had recently arrived. She took hidden money with her to pay anyone she could find to serve in Greenwood’s place as a substitute. Terrified that her son would be killed or wounded, she intended to talk her youngster into going back to Falmouth, where he could stay with his uncle and where he would be safe.
Mrs. Greenwood had not returned to Boston after the battle of Bunker Hill because of the chaos and new travel restrictions, this time imposed by the Americans. She had actually been living in Cambridge for six weeks, at a friend’s home, and spent her days there in sheer misery because men in the army had told her that they knew for a fact that her son had been killed at Bunker Hill in one of the ferocious British assaults. The few inquiries she had made turned up no sign of her son and, relying on information from soldiers she considered to be well informed, she drifted into prolonged mourning.
In mid-July, however, Mrs. Greenwood met Sergeant John Mills of Connecticut, who told her that her son was very much alive and living on the other side of Charlestown. An hour later, John Greenwood wrote, he was standing in front of his tent, staring out at the camp, when he heard joyful screams nearby. He wrote, “Who should I see but my mother, coming toward me in the company of Sergeant Mills.”
An emotional reunion of mother and son followed, but Mrs. Greenwood could not stay. She had managed to obtain a pass from General Washington himself to return home to Boston earlier that day and had to leave right away. Mrs. Greenwood walked to Bunker Hill, where she was admitted to the fort after showing her pass, and was then introduced to a British officer, Major John Small, whom she told friends was quite friendly. She was transported to her home and then she asked Small to take her to see General Gage.
It is unknown why she wanted to see Gage. As soon as she walked into his office his aides peppered her with questions about the size of the American army and its weapons and supplies. She apparently abandoned the conversation she planned to have with the British general under the barrage of queries. Angry that the officers were trying to pry information out of her, she snapped at Gage about his soldiers, “We are ready for them any time they choose to come out and attack us!”
She had reacted as a patriot, and as any mother of a soldier. Mrs. Greenwood was, however, a lone American Daniel in the middle of a Redcoat lion’s den. The officers were incensed at her reply and shouted at her, but Gage paid them no heed. He just waved them out of the room and told her to return to her home.
Greenwood and the rest of the men in the army were eager to attack the British army. “For danger, we knew none,” Greenwood bragged. Washington wanted to do so badly and planned an attack across the harbor at night, but his generals vetoed the idea.
In the winter of 1776, Washington decided that he could use a battery of cannon to shell the British from Dorchester Heights, a peninsula south of Boston that looked down at the city across the harbor he faced. The army did not have many cannon and none large enough to fire heavy cannonballs that far.
To the rescue came the improbable Henry Knox. The portly Knox, who weighed close to two hundred eighty pounds, had been a bookseller before the war and had read, he claimed, just about every book ever written on artillery. He had become head of the Continental Army’s artillery and told Washington that he would go to Fort Ticonderoga, in New York, with a regiment of men and transport the guns there to Boston. To do so, Knox and the soldiers had to move cannon out of the fort, cross Lake