Washington and his Comrades in Arms | Page 4

use of tea in his own household
and when war was imminent he had talked of recruiting a thousand
men at his own expense and marching to Boston. His steady wearing of
the uniform seemed, indeed, to show that he regarded the issue as
hardly less military than political.
The clash at Lexington, on the 19th of April, had made vivid the reality
of war. Passions ran high. For years there had been tension, long
disputes about buying British stamps to put on American legal papers,
about duties on glass and paint and paper and, above all, tea. Boston
had shown turbulent defiance, and to hold Boston down British soldiers
had been quartered on the inhabitants in the proportion of one soldier
for five of the populace, a great and annoying burden. And now British
soldiers had killed Americans who stood barring their way on
Lexington Green. Even calm Benjamin Franklin spoke later of the

hands of British ministers as "red, wet, and dropping with blood."
Americans never forgot the fresh graves made on that day. There were,
it is true, more British than American graves, but the British were
regarded as the aggressors. If the rest of the colonies were to join in the
struggle, they must have a common leader. Who should he be?
In June, while the Continental Congress faced this question at
Philadelphia, events at Boston made the need of a leader more urgent.
Boston was besieged by American volunteers under the command of
General Artemas Ward. The siege had lasted for two months, each side
watching the other at long range. General Gage, the British
Commander, had the sea open to him and a finely tempered army upon
which he could rely. The opposite was true of his opponents. They
were a motley host rather than an army. They had few guns and almost
no powder. Idle waiting since the fight at Lexington made untrained
troops restless and anxious to go home. Nothing holds an army together
like real war, and shrewd officers knew that they must give the men
some hard task to keep up their fighting spirit. It was rumored that
Gage was preparing an aggressive movement from Boston, which
might mean pillage and massacre in the surrounding country, and it was
decided to draw in closer to Boston to give Gage a diversion and prove
the mettle of the patriot army. So, on the evening of June 16, 1775,
there was a stir of preparation in the American camp at Cambridge, and
late at night the men fell in near Harvard College.
Across the Charles River north from Boston, on a peninsula, lay the
village of Charlestown, and rising behind it was Breed's Hill, about
seventy-four feet high, extending northeastward to the higher elevation
of Bunker Hill. The peninsula could be reached from Cambridge only
by a narrow neck of land easily swept by British floating batteries lying
off the shore. In the dark the American force of twelve hundred men
under Colonel Prescott marched to this neck of land and then advanced
half a mile southward to Breed's Hill. Prescott was an old campaigner
of the Seven Years' War; he had six cannon, and his troops were
commanded by experienced officers. Israel Putnam was skillful in
irregular frontier fighting, and Nathanael Greene, destined to prove
himself the best man in the American army next to Washington himself,
could furnish sage military counsel derived from much thought and
reading.

Thus it happened that on the morning of the 17th of June General Gage
in Boston awoke to a surprise. He had refused to believe that he was
shut up in Boston. It suited his convenience to stay there until a plan of
campaign should be evolved by his superiors in London, but he was
certain that when he liked he could, with his disciplined battalions,
brush away the besieging army. Now he saw the American force on
Breed's Hill throwing up a defiant and menacing redoubt and
entrenchments. Gage did not hesitate. The bold aggressors must be
driven away at once. He detailed for the enterprise William Howe, the
officer destined soon to be his successor in the command at Boston.
Howe was a brave and experienced soldier. He had been a friend of
Wolfe and had led the party of twenty-four men who had first climbed
the cliff at Quebec on the great day when Wolfe fell victorious. He was
the younger brother of that beloved Lord Howe who had fallen at
Ticonderoga and to whose memory Massachusetts had reared a
monument in Westminster Abbey. Gage gave him in all some
twenty-five hundred men, and, at about two in the afternoon, this force
was landed at Charlestown.
The little town was soon aflame and the smoke helped to conceal
Howe's movements. The day