The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [3]
In doing that, for eight long years and against significant hardship, they not only won the war, but helped to create a unique democratic nation—the United States of America—that, despite all of its problems, has thrived as a model for freedom for the more than two hundred years since, thanks to them.
THE FIRST AMERICAN ARMY
Chapter One
BUNKER HILL:
The Arrival of Private John Greenwood, Age Fifteen, Fifer
Early on the warm morning of June 17, 1775, British artillery in Boston and on Her Majesty’s ships in the harbor opened fire on the Charlestown peninsula, north of the city. The peninsula contained the community of Charlestown, with its four hundred homes and some two hundred shops, warehouses, barns, and churches, and three very high and large grassy hills: Bunker, the highest, Breed’s, and Morton’s. American troops had fortified Bunker and Breed’s hills with earthworks, wooden fencing, and six cannon on the previous evening. General Thomas Gage, the commanding general in British-occupied Boston, was determined to clear the wide knolls to prevent the rebels from maintaining an elevated location where they would shell his army in the city or his ships in the harbor. An artillery pounding was to be followed by an afternoon attack of more than fifteen hundred troops.
Just after 1:30 p.m., a small navy of twenty-eight wide barges—each filled with more than forty armed British soldiers, and one transporting the man in charge of the operation, General William Howe, and his staff—began to make its way across the harbor from Boston toward Morton’s Point. As the ships moved through the water, the eyes of the men on board focused on Breed’s and Bunker Hills.
At just over six feet tall, physically well-proportioned and able to remain calm under fire, the affable Howe cut an impressive military figure. He and his men landed and quickly realized that their cannon had the wrong-sized cannonballs and were inoperable. Howe sent the boats back for reinforcements and usable ammunition while the British navy and land artillery fired shells into Charlestown. The shells hit several of the wooden residences there, igniting small fires whose thick smoke drifted throughout the area. One shell hit a church steeple, setting it on fire, and it soon toppled into the street.
The British assault on the two hills was viewed by one of the largest audiences of civilians to witness any battle during the American Revolution. The British artillery had opened up earlier that morning and the cannonading awakened everyone. Hundreds of residents in Charlestown climbed to the tops of their homes and raced out into nearby streets and meadows to watch the fighting on the hills. In Boston, several thousand people stood on the roofs of their houses for a good view. Some climbed to the tops of churches. Hundreds more packed the wharves near the water where the view was clearer.
Somehow, it was Breed’s Hill, a lower and less defensible knoll than Bunker, that the majority of the Americans wound up fortifying that day as the British continually shelled the area. The top of the hill was so elevated that the men there could see all of Boston’s dozen or so church steeples. They could also look down on the mill pond, the north battery full of British cannon, Hudson’s Point, and, barely, John Hancock’s commercial shipping wharf, plus the tops of the masts of ships moored at the Long Wharf, on the other side of town. The provincial forces were led by General Israel Putnam, a veteran