The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ in debts and forced Britain to declare bankruptcy. It was said on the best authority that a London mob had destroyed the Parliament building and chased Lord North to France.

      Autumn sickness crept through the camps, and although the American force exceeded 20,000 by early November, those present and fit for duty remained below 14,000. The officer corps now comprised 60 colonels and lieutenant colonels, 30 majors, 290 captains, 558 lieutenants, and 65 ensigns. Washington’s host also included 21 chaplains, 31 surgeons, 1,238 sergeants, and 690 drummers and fifers. All games of chance, including pitch and hustle, which involved a halfpence coin, were forbidden by his order, so to build morale, wrestling matches were staged in late October between the brigades on Winter and Prospect Hills. Men foraged for chestnuts, apples, and turnips; they sang camp songs accompanied by German flutes. Weather forecasters studied the “upper side of the moon” for clues, though no one doubted that winter was coming. The army would need ten thousand cords of firewood in the next few months, and Washington was already fretting over “a most mortifying scarcity” that hindered recruiting and could force his regiments to disperse or risk freezing.

      Every day British fire drubbed the bivouacs, sometimes forty or fifty cannonballs for each American shot. “At about 9 a.m. we flung two 18-lb. balls into Boston from the lower fort, just to let them know where to find us, for which the enemy returned 90 shots,” a soldier told his diary in October. A comrade wrote of the same incident, “One man had his arm shot off there and two cows killed. Nothing new.” Local newspapers carried dozens of reward offers for deserters, including “one Jonathan Hantley, a well-set fellow, about five feet nine inches in height … talks with a brogue, pretends to doctor, professes to have great skill in curing cancers”; and Simeon Smith, “about 5 feet 4 inches high, had on a blue coat and black vest … his voice in the hermaphrodite fashion”; and “Matthias Smith, a small smart fellow, is apt to say, ‘I swear, I swear!’ and between his words will spit smart.”

      For more than twenty years Washington had doubted that amateur citizen soldiers could form what he called “a respectable army,” capable of defeating trained, disciplined professionals. Nothing he had seen in Cambridge changed his mind. Militiamen called to arms for a few weeks or months “will never answer your expectations,” he had once written. “No dependence is to be placed upon them. They are obstinate and perverse.” With most enlistments due to expire in December and January, Washington told Hancock on October 30 that perhaps half of all the junior officers were likely to leave the army and “I fear will communicate the infection” to the enlisted ranks. “I confess,” he added, “I have great anxieties upon the subject.”

      All the more reason to strike the British before winter arrived and his army drifted away. Yet his wish for “a speedy finish of the dispute” found little support among his generals. A proposed amphibious assault on Boston, supported by artillery and a frontal attack at the Neck, was unanimously rejected by his war council for fear that Boston would share Charlestown’s charred fate. Washington suggested another plan and it, too, was rejected, to a man, on October 18. “Too great a risk,” General Lee advised. “Not practicable under all circumstances,” General Greene added.

      He had little recourse but to husband his gunpowder, stockpile firewood, and launch an occasional raid or sniping sortie with the ten companies of riflemen Congress had sent from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Unlike muskets, rifle barrels were grooved to spin bullets for greater stability and accuracy. A capable marksman might hit a bull’s-eye at two hundred yards, although the weapon was slower to load; the projectile had to be wrapped in a greased linen patch and painstakingly “wanged” down the tighter bore. Moreover, no bayonet had yet been invented that would fit over a rifle muzzle. Riflemen were lethal and exotic, happily demonstrating their sharpshooting prowess while firing from their backs, or while running, or with trusting comrades holding targets between their knees. Many wore fringed hunting shirts, moccasins, and even Indian paint. Throngs of admiring civilians turned out to cheer them as the long-striding companies made their way toward Cambridge. They also proved maddening to their commanders, their boorish or insubordinate behavior sometimes leading to arrests and shackles. “Washington has said he wished they had never come,” General Ward told John Adams on October 30. Lee called them “damned riff-raff—dirty, mutinous, and disaffected.” Still, a Washington aide reported that rifle fire so unnerved the British “that nothing is to be seen over the breastwork but a hat.” A Yankee newspaper warned, “General Gage, take care of your nose.”

      But General Gage had gone, and he took his nose with him. In late September, Scarborough arrived in Boston with orders summoning Gage home, a decision made soon after the news of Bunker Hill reached London. The king had insisted that the general’s feelings be spared by pretending that he was being recalled to plan the 1776 campaign. Gage packed his personal papers in white pine boxes and, after a flurry of salutes, sailed aboard the transport Pallas at nine p.m. on October 11. He was soon forgotten, both in America and in England, though he continued to draw a salary as the Crown’s governor of Massachusetts. Horace Walpole joked that he might be hanged for the errors of his masters.

      William Howe moved into Province House as the new “general and commander-in-chief of all His Majesty’s forces within the colonies laying on the Atlantic Ocean from Nova Scotia to West Florida inclusive, etc., etc., etc.” Major General Howe’s sentiments on the occasion could not be discerned, for he remained relentlessly taciturn—“never wastes a monosyllable,” Walpole quipped—the better to hide his indecision. Now forty-six and thickset, with bulging eyes and a heavy brow, he bore an uncanny resemblance to his monarch, perhaps because his mother was widely rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of George I. His father, a viscount and the governor of Barbados, had died young in 1735. William Howe’s eldest brother, George, deemed “the best officer in the British Army,” had also died young, from a French bullet at Fort Carillon in 1758; in gratitude, Massachusetts paid £250 for a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. A second brother, Richard, succeeded to the viscount’s title and was now an admiral. William emerged belaureled from the French war, not least for his celebrated climb up a St. Lawrence River bluff to reach the Plains of Abraham—“laying hold of stumps and boughs of trees,” a witness reported—during Britain’s capture of Quebec. Family lore held that he returned to England clad in buckskin and moccasins, to be known thereafter to his siblings as “the Savage.”

      Elected to Parliament from Nottingham, the Savage advocated restraint in colonial policy and vowed never to take up arms against his American kinsmen—even as he privately advised Lords North and Dartmouth that he was willing to do precisely that. When orders came to report to Boston, he told a constituent that he “could not refuse without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serving my country in a day of distress.” He added assurances that “the insurgents are very few in comparison to the whole of the people.” Although he rarely spoke, was often wrong when he did, and seemed averse to advice, the manly if morose Howe was a welcome change within the ranks after Old Woman Gage. “He is much beloved by the whole army,” a captain wrote. “They feel a confidence in him.”

      Howe now had some eleven thousand mouths to feed, and little to feed them. “What in God’s name are ye all about in England?” an officer wrote in a letter published at home. “Have you forgot us?” Hospitals remained jammed with men suffering from wounds, scurvy, dysentery, and other maladies. “I have eat fresh meat but three times in six weeks,” a lieutenant wrote. Rebel whaleboats chased loyalist fishing smacks from coastal waters, severing supplies of cod, haddock, and terrapin. Bad mutton cost a shilling a pound; a skinny goose, twenty shillings. Salt meat was the inevitable staple, though said to be “as hard as wood, as lean as carrion, and as rusty as the devil.” General Percy reportedly killed and roasted a foal for his table, while one Winifried McCowen, a camp retainer, took a hundred lashes across her back for stealing and butchering the town bull. A Boston man wrote that he had been “invited by two gentlemen to dine upon rats.”

      With each passing day, the blockade grew more oppressive. “They are burrowing like rabbits all around us,” wrote Captain Glanville Evelyn, now СКАЧАТЬ