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Subject: [A-REV] Dorchester Heights by Thomas W. Clarke - Part 5 of 7.
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 21:57:43 EDT
Subject: Dorchester Heights by Thomas W. Clarke - Part 5 of 7
Source: The New England Magazine. Vol 24. Issue 2.
Published April 1898.
Dorchester Heights
Part 5
p.227
The troops arrived at the Dorchester lines as the sun
was setting, and turned toward Boston. Whitcomb, with
his own regiment and Ward's, had the advance, then came
some of the carts with puncheons to repair the road and
make by-roads in the fields, for there must be going and
coming all night and a single track would not suffice.
Then came carts with entrenching tools. Then Thomas
moved the other three regiments of his brigade. When they had got well
started, Thomas rode ahead through the
carts and through the troops for a long mile, and at last reached the head of
the column. Here he found an
officer and working party selected for the purpose, to
whom he gave directions to halt at a given place and to
take the first loads of hay that came along to form a
parapet of hay bales on the Boston side of the way, where the works on the
Neck had a command of a small
part of the road over which the movement was taking place.
Then he sent one regiment to the right and one to the left and deployed them
at proper intervals and with
proper supports and reserves along the western shore and on Nook's Hill and
on the great eastern hill which over-
looked the Castle.
Ward had remained at Dorchester to start the train. He
sent it forward by instalments, first a lot of hay, then of baskets and
fagots, then some platform stuff, then some box shooks. The hay carts did
not at first go all
the way, but unloaded near the isthmus. Having started
the first loads, Ward left directions as to following up
the dispatch, each vehicle confining itself to its original commodity and
going always back to the depot near Meeting-house Hill for its new order.
Gridley and Putnam with a party of men were already at
work staking out the fort on the Twin Hills. The carts
came along; several extra yoke of oxen were at the foot
of the hills, with chains to hitch on the tongues of the
wagons and double up the teams to ascend the steep slopes; and each outfit
unloaded and turned off to re-
gain the return road, which led back over the new and partly planked route
over the marshes.
For two nights the town had been bombarded and battered
by the heavy siege batteries near Dorchester and East
Cambridge, and on this occasion the practice was continued. At eight o'clock
the first ground in Dorchester Neck was broken. It was two before the last
cart had left the peninsula. Some of them had made four
trips, some three, all made more than one. A hundred
carts and wagons were desired to remain at Dorchester,
the rest were dismissed. The special duty men went back
to the ranks.
The material brought was arranged into the semblance of
a parapet, by laying it on or near the trace of the works. The sugar boxes
were put together and filled with earth, to form a parapet. The gabions were
set up
and filled, and a line or two of fascines anchored on
top. The revetting material constantly accumulating as
unnessary where it was first laid was carried off to ex-
tend temporarily the works further on and there be filled and consolidated
into formidable works.
At first the works were slight affairs of small timber hardly musket-proof,
and then were connected and consolidated leisurely but easily into
substantial earthworks.
Thomas's men worked in two reliefs, and at four in the
morning, Spencer's brigade came on to "spell" them.
p.228
There were now about four thousand men on the peninsula,
with half a mile of parapet, such as it was - some very good - and a quarter
mile of hay-bale parapet on the
west with some heavy guns and mortars in position. There were hundreds of
barrels full of earth to roll down hill if necessary, to fight behind, if
desirable.
Although the parapet made a great show at a mile off,
and even near at hand to inexperienced troops, Gridley,
Putnam and Knox pressed the work of conversion of the
semblance made by the night work, a mere loose wicker-
work - laid up to form into a substantial gravel-packed
gabionnade.
They wanted it to be twelve feet thick at base and six
feet high, with a musketry banquette within and with gun
embrasures lined up with gabions and veneered with raw-
hide. Towards this desirable condition it grew marvel-
lously from hour to hour.
Looking over from town in the early morning, General Howe and his brigade and
artillery commanders saw and
marvelled. Howe wrote, to excuse himself for the
evacuation and bound to state his case strongly, yet with a statement so
strong that it is clear the menace
of an overwhelming and preponderating force had impressed him: "They have
done more in a night than my
army could have done in a month. It must have been the
employment of 12,000 men."
Only 1,200 New Englanders at a time had plied the pick and the spade. Howe's
army was 8,000 men. He could get out of them a movable column of 2,400 in
the course of a
day, and of this perhaps half could have been worked daily for a month in
three reliefs of 400 men at a time.
The two estimates agree exactly (30 x 400 = 12,000). An
army of English and Irish peasantry could not be ignorant of the spade and
pick of the ditcher. Thus even
if the farmers of New England had double efficiency, it is clear the
mechanical imitation of strong parapets had impressed him.
General Howe as a soldier knew that men are rapidly
matured into readiness for molestation unless repelled.
His admiral told him the harbor would be untenable for the fleet, the day the
Dorchester batteries opened. They commanded at short range all the inhabited
portions of the town. To a man of courage such a challenge admitted of no
reply but prompt acceptance. The blood of Prince Rupert boiled in his veins
when he thought of compulsion, and captivity threatened him, the king's
remote cousin, descendant of that bold rider who he had cause to look up to
but one better general than himself in all the great Civil War. Here were
Rupert and Cromwell again face to face, Rupert in the English general,
Rupert's great-grandson, and Cromwell in the sturdy Puritans of the besieging
army.
To be continued Part 6 - p.228
Transcribed by Janice Farnsworth
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