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Subject: [A-REV] Dorchester Heights by Thomas W. Clarke, 1898 - Part 7 of 7
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 12:35:00 EDT
Subject: Dorchester Heights by Thomas W. Clarke - Part 7
Source: The New England Magazine. Vol 24. Issue 2.
Published April 1898.
Dorchester Heights
Yankee Ingenuity Wins !
Part 7 of 7
p.229 - 231
March 6, 1776
All through the day the patriot army toiled. New gabionnades went up along
the slopes on the Castle side
and towards the harbor; new battery platforms were laid,
the puncheons were taken from the roadway over the marshes and brought onto
the ground to be put into the forts as scantlings and revetments. The wet
earth, packed solidly as it was thrown up, naturally puddled by
the rain. By midnight of the 6th the lodgment was secure; Dorchester Heights
were in possession of Ward's
right wing, and Spencer's brigade was assigned to hold
them; Thomas went back to his old lines.
March 7th
Would Washington cannonade the town, would he fire on
the ships of war and transports? Howe got ready to
leave. There was fear lest he should burn the place.
March 8th
At an informal interview of some of the town officers with one of Howe's
staff an understanding was reached.
p.230
If Howe could leave without a battle, he would not burn
the town. This was communicated.
March 9th
Washington said to Colonel Learned, who brought it to
him, that the paper was unofficial. "I can take no notice of it."
He did not cannonade the town.*
*footnote:
Washington's letters to the President of Congress relating to the occupation
of Dorchester Heights and all
the movements during February and March, 1776, up to his
entrance into Boston, have been gathered into an Old South Church Leaflet.
March 9-16th
He erected new batteries, the last within half a mile
of Fort Hill. This was official notice to hurry up.
Transports began to drop down the harbor.
March 17th
The horse transports went first with only part of the
horses. At two o'clock in the morning, March 17th the
troops began to embark. Many of the Tory citizens also
went on shipboard. At nine o'clock all the garrison of
Charlestown marched down to the shore and took boats for
the transports. They left behind them a few suits of old clothes stuffed
with straw from their camp beds and
set up to conceal their departure for a few brief minutes.
Then the fifth foot of Percy's brigade, and the tenth
foot of Pigot's fell back from the two extremities of
the town. These connected with the grenadiers and light
infantry in the centre moving east from the Common and,
gathering the stragglers and making front here and there, at ten o'clock they
took boats at the wharves and
went on shipboard. The ships and transports sailed to the lower bay and
anchored at Nantasket Roads, where they were detained for several days.
As soon as it was seen that the British were leaving
Boston, the troops under Putnam crossed the river in boats and landed at
Sewall's point in Charlestown. They soon discovered the deception in the
fort on Bunker Hill. General Putnam sent one detachment to
Boston, and after some troops had been left in the
Bunker Hill fort, the rest returned to Cambridge.
Meanwhile, General Ward was marching in from Roxbury over the Neck with five
hundred men under the immediate
command of Colonel Learned, who opened the gates. They
were on foot on account of the great number of caltrops
in the way. Near the head of the column was General Knox. The day was a
warm one, the way was long, and
Knox was fat.
As he passed the house of Mather Byles,
the old Tory said audibly to a bystander, "Did you ever
in your life see so fat an ox?"
Knox replied, "You're a damned old fool," and marched on.
The spring campaign had opened on the night of March 4th
1776. It closed in twelve days. The British army took
its last march through Roxbury on April 19, 1775, and on
that day had marched through every town from which the
siege was pressed - Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge,
Charlestown. Between that time, until the move of March
4, 1776, it had fought one skirmishing fight with the
Minute-men and one pitched battle, which was won with
greater proportionate slaughter than Malplaquet or
Waterloo. On June 17th, 1775, it had gained a dominion
of a few hundred acres with a loss of a thousand officers and men. In nine
months to a day it gave up
all its dominions because it could not risk another battle with the
provincials.
It had yielded at last to logistics which had combined
all the resources of the country against it, to a
strategy which had brought together in one spot at an
appointed time all these resources and had arrayed them
in so imposing a shape as to produce a stress on the mind of the besieged
fully equal to their military value, perhaps superior to it, to the
providential delay
caused by the opportune storm, and to the skillful siege
tactics, which employed the noise of a bombardment to
mask the rattle of a movement taking place close by, and
exacted a noisy reply which further masked the movement.
p.231.
The besieger then stoody ready, menacing, and menacing
more as days went by, first annoyance, then the arduous
dangers of a desperate battle, at last irretrievable
ruin at his will, and yet he struck no blow, and declined to shed blood till
annihilation was prepared.
The provincial loss in this spring campaign was four men
killed. "Perhaps," said Heath, "there was never so much
work done in so short a space of time." Certainly no
such complete success in any war was ever reached with
so little sorrow to the combatant. For the courage of
the undertaking was directed by a prudence which forsaw
and made necessary for General Howe a dislocation of his
army, an abandonment of communication between its wings,
a cramped and unsheltered column of attack, an assault
over a steep hillside by infantry alone, without artillery, against
earthworks, guns and musketry, and
which provided all things needed for repulse except time.
The courage and prudence of the Americans was providentially aided by the
storm, which gave the needed
time and made the prosect appalling even for the gluttons of Bunker Hill.
Truly might the British think
and say that "neither hell, Hull nor Halifax could afford worse shelter" than
Boston overshadowed by that
chain of batteries and their occupants.
The things most admirable in the occupation of Dorchester were the faculty
which took the things at
hand and used them for the purposes needed and the surging patriotic spirit
which gathered the old men
and the boys who were unfit for the continuous fatigues
and hardships of war to share the most arduous of all its labors, the
erection of earthworks, for a few days and nights, and who had brought with
them the power of
the province, in carts and draught animals to produce a moral stress far
greater than the compulsion actually
exerted.
The menace of Dorchester Heights would have been lessened most probably if
they had fired on the town;
the reality would have hurt less than the anticipation.
This last move of the siege had proved that in the trade
of war the professional is dependent far more than is
usually admitted upon the civilian. So in the Crimea
it was the railroad contractor and the "navvy" who re-
stored the wasting life of the English army.
I have told this story as it came from my father, who had heard it from his
father, who helped to organize
the movement and participated in it. It is only a
sketch, probably with error in details, but probably also strictly true in
its broad featuries.
Thomas W. Clarke, 1898.
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