The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [9]
Boston was a busy seaport in 1775, home to more than forty wharves and a dozen active shipyards. The city’s vessels were involved in a profitable trade between England, Europe, and the Caribbean, with some ships bringing slaves to the southern colonies from the Caribbean. The city was the most sophisticated in America, with more than a dozen handsome churches; several theaters; a government house, Fanueil Hall, with its handsome brick and column exterior; prosperous Merchants’ Row, a street along the waterfront jammed with three-story-high buildings; a good newspaper, the Massachusetts Spy; and more than two thousand homes and businesses. It was a city filled with popular taverns and hundreds of chimneys that could be seen for miles. The streets were filled with men on horseback, women in carriages, and workers with their small, horse-drawn carts.2
The city had become the colonies’ leading shipbuilding port, the center of the Atlantic fishing industry, and North America’s capital for hat making, the leather trade, distilled rum, hardware, and inexpensive furniture and carriages. Now it was a town under siege.3
The residents felt trapped. The city was under martial law and travel was severely restricted. The British army camped on the commons and commandeered warehouses, infuriating patriots. The editor of the Pennsylvania Journal called the Redcoats there “creatures” and wrote “the spirit which prevails among the [British] soldiers is that of malice and revenge; that there is no true courage to be observed among them.”4
The town’s loyalists constantly feared an attack by the rebels outside the city limits. One British sympathizer, Peter Oliver, wrote that “Our situation here, without exaggeration, is beyond description almost; it is such as eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive Boston ever to arrive at . . . we are besieged this moment with ten or fifteen thousand men . . . all marketing from the country stopped . . . fire and slaughter hourly threatened and not out of danger from some of the inhabitants within of setting the town on fire.”5
All was chaos.
Greenwood was told that many houses in Charlestown were vacant, abandoned by residents who had fled. He found one and slept there for several days, with others. One night he was in a crowded Charlestown tavern and was asked to play his fife by Hardy Pierce, the first corporal in Captain T. T. Bliss’s company, after some soldiers saw the instrument sticking out of his pocket. He played several tunes, the music drowned out by the noise in the tavern, and the men were delighted. They brought him to the home of an Episcopal minister that had been commandeered as their regimental headquarters after the clergyman fled the city. The soldiers, and Captain Bliss, eventually convinced him to join their regiment as a fifer for an eight month enlistment at pay of eight dollars per month.
Most of the men in the American army slept in tents, but some, like Greenwood, were lucky. In addition to his eight dollars, Greenwood, probably because of his age, was allowed to live in the home of a local man who had left town and turned his residence over to the American army. Greenwood and several others shared a room, each sleeping on the floor with their knapsacks for pillows.
Another teenager, seventeen-year-old Elijah Fisher, from Attleboro, Massachusetts, whose six brothers all served in the war in some capacity, slept with others in the home of a local merchant named Nepven in Jamaica Plains, four miles outside Boston.6 Many men were given quarters in rooms at different buildings at Harvard College. For others, luck sometimes ran out. Private James Stevens, of Massachusetts, like Greenwood, was fortunate to be given a small room in a Charlestown house for his quarters. Stevens returned from guard duty one evening, however, to discover