The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [19]
Washington ordered the cannon, protected by hundreds of bales of hay, placed on the heights in the middle of the night so that the men doing the work would not be seen and wind up as targets for British sentries. It was an enormous job undertaken on the evening of March 4. The completion of the work took three thousand men under General John Thomas, laboring all night, but by the first light of morning the hill was completely fortified.
Greenwood was on the heights that next morning, peering down at Boston across the water, a target he believed would be rather easy to shell for the more than two dozen guns Knox had mounted on the hills. The British were wary of the guns as soon as sentries spotted them after the sun rose that morning. They felt like sitting ducks. The English planned to storm Dorchester Heights in a flotilla of small boats, but an unforeseen storm arose on the night of the invasion and they had to give up the assault. Greenwood had looked forward to an attack. He wrote, “If they had succeeded in landing they would certainly have been overpowered, for it was a steep hill and the Americans had a number of hogsheads and barrels filled with sand to roll down upon them, and intended to sally out of the fort upon them when in confusion and they would have liked no better fun.”
The British did not like the “fun” the Americans provided on the night that their insulting play, Blockade of Boston, written by General Burgoyne, was staged in January at their fort on top of Bunker Hill. The British army presented the drama to mock the American forces, but there was an extra, unwritten act in the script.
As the play commenced at about 9 p.m., Greenwood, fife in his waistband, was summoned along with fifty other men to march silently along a causeway belonging to Charlestown mills that ran beneath the fort. When most of Charlestown was burned on the day of the Bunker Hill battle, about ten or twelve damaged houses had been abandoned by their owners. Sutlers, homeless people, and camp followers, including people who sold merchandise to British soldiers, had moved into them. The plan was to attack the homes while the British army’s amateur thespians were busy with their play and not paying much attention to anything else. Only a few men were left to stand guard over the neighborhood.
Greenwood wrote, “We surprised the sentries, took a number of prisoners, and set fire to these houses right under their very noses, the enemy at the fort being so astonished as not to fire for some time, at least not until the houses were in a light blaze.”
Ironically, the fires became visible right at the key moment in the play at the fort up above. In the drama, a Yankee sentinel, dressed as a tailor with paper measures hanging over his shoulders and his large shears sticking out of his pocket, rested upon his musket. He was talking to another Bostonian and looking out toward the harbor. A British sergeant, spotting the fire, ran on to the stage and shouted, “To arms! To arms! Gentlemen, the rebels are upon us!”
Everyone assumed that the sergeant was part of the play; they cheered lustily but did not move from their seats. “The audience clapped their hands stoutly because he did so well, and it was some time before he could make them understand it was no sham. When they did, however, they tumbled downstairs, over one another, as fast as they could and broke up the Yankee play,” Greenwood recalled.
Unable to storm Dorchester Heights and certain that his men could not survive continued artillery bombardment from the cannon stationed there, General Howe, who had succeeded Gage in charge of the army in Boston on October