LA Learn Article 5

Laurel Anna Learn Article #5

The Long Goodbye

On the night of March 4, 1776, about 2,000 American soldiers under General John Thomas climbed Dorchester Heights, a pair of hills overlooking Boston and its harbor, and got to work. The ground was frozen too hard to dig, so they had come prepared. Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Putnam had designed a fort that could be built ahead of time and assembled in a single night: heavy wooden frames called chandeliers, packed with fascines, or tight bundles of branches. Some 360 carts pulled by 800 oxen hauled the pieces up the hill, while bales of hay lined the route to hide the traffic from view and muffle the grinding of the wheels. To drown out whatever noise got through, American cannons elsewhere around Boston bombarded the town, just as they had the two nights before.

As the men worked, Washington reminded them that the coming day was the sixth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, “a day never to be forgotten.” By sunrise on March 5, the hilltop bristled with about twenty cannons, part of the heavy artillery that Colonel Henry Knox had dragged all the way from Fort Ticonderoga in New York that winter. Every one of them pointed down at the British fleet riding at anchor below.

[Figure 1. Portrait of General Sir William Howe

Sir William Howe (1729–1814), later 5th Viscount Howe, commander-in-chief of British forces in America during the siege and evacuation of Boston. Engraving by Henry Bryan Hall, 1872.

Public domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gen._Sir_William_Howe.jpg

The British woke up to find a fortress where there hadn’t been one the night before. One British officer marveled that the job had been done as swiftly as if the genie from Aladdin’s lamp had done it. General William Howe reportedly exclaimed that the rebels had done more in one night than his army could have done in three months, and his engineer, Archibald Robertson, calculated that the work must have required 15,000 to 20,000 men. (It took far fewer.) British gunners opened fire, but they couldn’t angle their cannons high enough to hit the hilltop.

The threat was more than embarrassing. Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, who commanded the fleet, warned Howe that his ships would be “shot to pieces” if those guns stayed put. Howe’s first instinct was to answer the way the British had answered at Bunker Hill the previous June: head-on. He ordered troops into boats bound for Castle Island, the staging point for an assault on the heights. Washington, for his part, had 4,000 men standing ready to strike Boston itself the moment Howe took the bait. Then the weather stepped in. A violent nor’easter churned up the harbor and made any landing impossible. By March 6, Howe had called off the attack. There would be no second Bunker Hill.

In truth, Howe had wanted out of Boston for months. Orders from London to abandon the town before winter had arrived too late to carry out, so he had planned to wait for spring and leave on his own terms. The guns on Dorchester Heights simply moved up his schedule. Deciding to leave and actually leaving, though, turned out to be two very different things.

Why It Took Eleven More Days

On March 8, a group of Boston’s leading citizens sent a message out to the American lines: Howe had no intention of burning the town, as long as his troops were left alone while they boarded their ships. That put Washington in an awkward spot. British commanders refused to address him by his rank, since doing so would acknowledge the authority of the Continental Congress, and this message wasn’t addressed to him by name or title either. So Washington formally declined to answer it. Yet he behaved exactly as if he had agreed, holding his fire while the British packed. Neither side ever called it a deal. It simply worked like one.

Figure 2. A Plan of Boston, and its Environs

A British map showing the positions of British and American forces around Boston as of October 1775. The survey was made chiefly by Lieutenant Richard Williams of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and the map was published in London by Andrew Dury in March 1776, just days before the British left Boston. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Public domain. Source: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3764b.ar093200/

The Americans didn’t sit still, though. On the night of March 9, troops tried to fortify Nook’s Hill, a smaller rise even closer to the town’s wharves. A campfire gave them away, and the British answered with a cannonade that lasted all night and killed several men. The next day, the Americans collected some 700 British cannonballs from the hillside. They kept trying, and on the night of March 16, they finally finished their works on Nook’s Hill, one more reason for Howe to hurry.

Hurrying was easier said than done. Howe had to cram nearly 9,000 soldiers, more than 1,200 women and children traveling with the army, and about 1,100 Loyalist civilians onto roughly 120 ships, along with every cannon, wagon, and barrel of provisions the fleet could carry. Sickness and desertion had thinned the navy’s crews so badly over the winter that some ships had no one to sail them, and those were destroyed rather than left for the rebels. Then there was the wind. It turned favorable on March 15, only to shift before the fleet could sail. Not until March 17 did it cooperate. Starting at about 4 a.m., the troops began moving out, and by 9 a.m., every ship was underway. As a parting gift, the British scattered crow’s feet, small iron spikes meant to cripple anyone who followed, across Boston Neck, the narrow strip of land connecting the town to the mainland. Even then, the fleet didn’t go far. It lingered in the outer harbor for ten more days before finally setting course for Halifax, Nova Scotia, on March 27.

Not a Clean Exit

For ordinary Bostonians who weren’t loyal to the king, the siege hadn’t been just eleven months of waiting. It had been eleven months of being trapped. Right after the fighting at Lexington and Concord, General Thomas Gage barred residents from leaving. Even when departures were allowed, getting out meant passing British checkpoints on Boston Neck, being searched for weapons, and obtaining a pass, and passes were handed out grudgingly. In May 1775, one resident complained that only two or three were being issued a day. Sarah Winslow Deming wrote that she was “Genl Gage’s prisoner,” with “all egress, & regress being cut off.”

Food ran short almost at once. With the countryside closed off, soldiers and civilians alike lived on salted provisions. “Pork & beans one day, & beans & pork another,” the merchant John Andrews grumbled that spring. Meat that no one would once have picked up off the street was now for sale in the market, he reported, and it sold. Another merchant, John Rowe, wrote that Boston was “in the most distressed condition,” and a town meeting warned General Gage that residents were in danger of “perishing” unless the roads were reopened. Supply ships from Britain offered little relief. American privateers captured dozens of them over the winter, and winter storms made the crossing even harder.

Hunger wasn’t the only hardship. Under martial law, press gangs roamed the streets rounding up civilian men for labor, and anyone suspected of aiding the rebels could be jailed. One diarist, William Cheever, noted “several Persons taken up and imprisoned upon Suspicion” and called it the usual consequence of martial law. Firewood grew so scarce that soldiers tore down wooden buildings to burn, including the Old North Meeting House.

In late November 1775, General Howe, who had replaced Gage that fall, made an even harsher call. He loaded about 300 of Boston’s poorest residents onto boats and put them ashore at Point Shirley, a bare, windswept peninsula across the harbor, with almost nothing to live on. Washington ordered provisions sent to them and described them as being in “the most miserable & piteous condition.” He also worried about something worse than hunger. Smallpox was raging inside Boston, and he feared the refugees would carry it into his camp.

By the final days of the occupation in March 1776, hardship had turned into open plunder. On March 10, Howe ordered residents to hand over all their linen and woolen goods, and he later added items such as salt, sugar, flour, and furniture: anything that might help the rebels carry on the war. He put a Loyalist named Crean Brush in charge of collecting it all, in exchange for certificates that were practically worthless. Soldiers broke into homes and shops; Rowe wrote that “they stole many things and plundered my store.” Brush never got to enjoy his haul. American vessels captured his loaded ship before it could reach Halifax. The army did make some effort to punish its own: over the course of the siege and the two months after it, at least 27 British soldiers, officers, and camp followers were tried by general courts-martial for crimes against Boston’s residents, mostly robbery and plunder.

Some of the town’s most cherished buildings fared no better. The Old South Meeting House, where some 5,000 colonists had packed in on the day of the Boston Tea Party, was gutted. Its pews and pulpit were torn out and burned for fuel, dirt was hauled in, and the sanctuary became a riding school for British cavalry, complete, according to the National Park Service, with a bar in the first balcony. And three days after the fleet left town, British engineers blew up Castle William, the fort guarding the harbor, and burned what remained so the Americans couldn’t use it.

When it was over, selectman Timothy Newell summed up what many Bostonians felt. On March 17, he wrote in his journal that the town had been “relieved from a set of men, whose unparalleled wickedness, profanity, debauchery, and cruelty is inexpressible.”

Figure 3. The Evacuation of Boston

The British fleet departs Boston Harbor, March 17, 1776. Oil painting attributed to Darius Cobb (1834–1919).

Public domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_evacuation_of_Boston.jpg

What They Left Behind

There was a small measure of justice in how hastily the British left. For all their looting, they departed in such a rush that they abandoned a fortune. Washington estimated that they had left behind at least £30,000 worth of the king’s property in provisions, stores, vessels, rugs, and blankets. His men found nearly thirty heavy cannons, all “spiked,” meaning metal spikes had been jammed into the firing holes to make them useless, and they promptly began drilling them out. There were a mortar or two and plenty of shot and shells, along with artillery carts and powder wagons. More than a hundred horses had been left behind in the stables, since there was no room for them on the ships. After a long, hungry winter, it was a windfall for the Continental Army.

Why Washington Couldn’t Just Walk In

That smallpox problem was the real reason Washington couldn’t simply march his army into town the moment the British sailed. The disease had been tearing through Boston for months, and reports had circulated that the British were deliberately sending infected people out to spread it to the American lines. Washington took the danger seriously. During the siege, he called smallpox “a weapon of defence they are useing against us,” and four days before the evacuation, his orders accused the enemy of spreading the infection through all parts of the town. He had reason to be careful. Washington himself had survived smallpox as a nineteen-year-old on a visit to Barbados in 1751 and was immune for life, but most of his soldiers came from isolated farms and villages and had never been exposed. In 1777, he would describe the disease as a potentially greater danger than “the Sword of the Enemy.”

Figure 4. Washington at Dorchester Heights

George Washington (1732–1799), commander of the Continental Army, at Dorchester Heights in March 1776. Oil on panel by Gilbert Stuart, 1806. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, deposited by the City of Boston. Stuart’s daughter, Jane Stuart, later painted copies of the work.

Public domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WashingtonAtDorchesterHeightsByStuart.jpeg

So instead of sending everyone in on March 17, Washington picked about 1,000 soldiers who had already survived smallpox and sent them in first under General Artemas Ward. As the troops approached, they spotted redcoats still standing guard on Bunker Hill, until a closer look revealed that the “sentries” were dummies dressed in old uniforms, one last bluff from a departing enemy. Washington himself entered the town on March 18. On March 20, with the risk judged to be lower, more regiments marched in under orders to take every possible precaution against the infection. Even so, smallpox lingered in Boston until the end of the summer.

What It All Meant

Disease, looting, and a nervous standoff aside, the recovery of Boston was the Continental Army’s first major victory, and it had been won with almost no bloodshed. Congress voted Washington its thanks and ordered a gold medal struck in his honor. But Washington knew the fight was far from over. Suspecting, correctly, that New York would be the next British target, he began sending his regiments south and left for New York himself on April 4, leaving only a small garrison behind in Boston.

Boston still marks March 17th as Evacuation Day, a holiday in Suffolk County that shares the calendar with the city’s famous St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. It is a quieter holiday than the Fourth of July, but for Boston, it marks the moment the first chapter of the Revolution came to a close.

Definitions and Phrases:

Nook’s Hill: A small hill, also called Foster’s Hill, on the western edge of the Dorchester peninsula in what is now South Boston. It wasn’t the highest point of Dorchester Heights, but it looked directly across the water at Boston Neck and the town’s wharves. American troops finally fortified it on the night of March 16, 1776, adding one last push to the British departure.

Republican Motherhood: An idea that took hold after the Revolution: that mothers had a civic duty to raise their children, especially their sons, to be virtuous, well-informed citizens who could sustain the new republic. It gave women a new kind of importance in public life, even though they still could not vote.

Nor’easter: A powerful storm along the East Coast of North America, named for the strong winds that blow in from the northeast. Nor’easters often bring heavy rain or snow and rough seas, and one of them wrecked the British plan to attack Dorchester Heights in March 1776.

Deacon Timothy Newell: A Boston selectman and church deacon who remained in town through the entire siege. His journal runs from the day fighting broke out in April 1775 to the British departure in March 1776, and its accounts of shortages and hardship are among the best surviving records of what ordinary Bostonians endured.

The Yanks: Short for “Yankees,” a nickname for American colonists, especially New Englanders. The word’s origin is uncertain, but British soldiers were using it as an insult by 1775. Early in the war, the British also sang “Yankee Doodle” to mock the colonists, but the Americans adopted the song as their own and turned the insult into a badge of pride.

Fishmongers: People who sell fish for a living, a common trade in a busy colonial port town like Boston.

Rank and File: The ordinary soldiers in an army, as opposed to the officers who give the orders. The phrase comes from the way troops were arranged on the battlefield: in “ranks” (rows standing side by side) and “files” (columns lined up front to back).

Sources

The Evacuation of Boston, 1776 (National Park Service) — https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/evacuation-of-boston-1776.htm

“Bring on a Rumpus:” The Seizure of Dorchester Heights (National Park Service) — https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/fortifying-dorchester-heights.htm

Siege of Boston (George Washington’s Mount Vernon) — https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/siege-of-boston

Smallpox (George Washington’s Mount Vernon) — https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/smallpox

What Forced the British to Leave Boston in 1776? (History of Massachusetts Blog) — https://historyofmassachusetts.org/what-forced-british-leave-boston/

Evacuation Day (Massachusetts) (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_Day_(Massachusetts)

Siege of Boston (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Boston

Boston Battle Facts and Summary (American Battlefield Trust) —https://www.battlefields.org/learn/revolutionary-war/battles/boston

George Washington and the First Mandatory Immunization (Journal of the American Revolution) — https://allthingsliberty.com/2021/10/george-washington-and-the-first-mandatory-immunization/

Evacuation Day and the Aftermath of the Siege of Boston (Paul Revere House) — https://www.paulreverehouse.org/evacuation-day-and-the-aftermath-of-the-siege-of-boston/

Highlights From The Vault — Evacuation of Boston (Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library) — https://www.leventhalmap.org/articles/highlights-from-the-vault-evacuation-of-boston/

American Revolution Podcast: Episode 086, Evacuation of Boston — https://blog.amrevpodcast.com/2019/03/episode-086-evacuation-of-boston.html

Old South Meeting House (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_South_Meeting_House

Fort Independence, Massachusetts (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Independence_(Massachusetts)

Anxiety and Distress: Civilians Inside the Siege of Boston (Journal of the American Revolution) — https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/02/anxiety-distress-civilians-inside-siege-boston/

Siege of Boston: Eyewitness Accounts (Massachusetts Historical Society) — https://www.masshist.org/features/siege-of-boston/eyewitness

American Revolution Podcast: Episode 074, Occupied Boston, 1775 — https://blog.amrevpodcast.com/2018/12/episode-074-occupied-boston-1775.html

George Washington to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Reed, 27 November 1775 (Founders Online, National Archives) — https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0401

General Orders, 13 March 1776 (Founders Online, National Archives) — https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-03-02-0336

General Orders, 20 March 1776 (Founders Online, National Archives) — https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-03-02-0370

Displaced: The Donation People of 1775 (Journal of the American Revolution) — https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/10/displaced-donation-people-1775/

Massachusetts Privateers During the Siege of Boston (Journal of the American Revolution) — https://allthingsliberty.com/2019/09/massachusetts-privateers-during-the-siege-of-boston/

Smallpox Inoculation in the Revolutionary War (National Park Service) — https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/smallpox-inoculation-revolutionary-war.htm

Old South Meeting House (National Park Service) — https://www.nps.gov/bost/learn/historyculture/osmh.htm

Boston Under Siege (U.S. Army) — https://www.army.mil/article/7726/boston_under_siege

Washington at Dorchester Heights, collection record (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) — https://collections.mfa.org/objects/30879

Definitions and Phrases Sources

Foster’s Hill (National Park Service) — https://www.nps.gov/places/foster-s-hill.htm

Republican Motherhood (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_motherhood

Yankee (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yankee-nickname

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