250 years ago today, Boston was freed from eight years of occupation — thanks largely to 25-year-old Henry Knox.
250 years ago today, Boston was freed from eight years of occupation — thanks largely to 25-year-old Henry Knox.
A merican troops have liberated a great many places from tyrants and occupying armies in our history. The very first place we liberated was Boston — 250 years ago today.
By March of 1776, Boston had been groaning under the British heel for a long time. Military force arrived eight years earlier in the form of the HMS Romney, which pulled into Boston Harbor in May 1768 to enforce the Stamp Act and promptly seized a ship owned by John Hancock. Occupation followed. Six years had now passed since the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, when the city’s garrison fired on a mob of Bostonians, killing five. Following the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, Boston Harbor was closed on June 1, 1774, and Lieutenant-General Thomas Gage was appointed as military governor.
Eleven months earlier, on April 19, 1775, the redcoats marched out of Boston on an expedition to capture Hancock and Samuel Adams and confiscate the weapons of the Massachusetts militia. They came home from Lexington and Concord an army at war, hounded and harassed by citizen minutemen all the way. They had come to control Boston, and now they were bottled up in it and needed to secure their flanks:
Boston was the center of three peninsulas in the harbor, connected to the mainland only by a narrow isthmus, the Neck. After . . . Lexington and Concord, both sides sufficiently barricaded the Neck so that the patriots could not get in, and the redcoats could not get out. To the north was the smaller peninsula of Charlestown, also connected to the mainland only by a thin neck. . . . The southern peninsula, Dorchester, was dominated by the imposing Dorchester Heights, 112 feet high and steep. With a wider connection to the mainland, Dorchester required a larger force to secure. Near the Charlestown neck was Bunker Hill. Occupying it would command the peninsula. . . . The British command hatched a plan to take Bunker Hill followed by securing the Dorchester Heights.
On June 17, in the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British attacked and seized the Charlestown peninsula. But the ghastly losses from the battle deterred them from sallying forth again to take the Dorchester Heights. A bitter stalemate soon set in. The Royal Navy could supply the troops in Boston, and so long as they held the Charlestown peninsula, the British position was secure from small-arms fire. George Washington, appointed the day before Bunker Hill to command a Continental Army that didn’t yet exist, arrived in Cambridge on July 2 and was authorized by Congress to induct the militias into the army on July 4. Washington agonized over how to crack open Boston, at one point even devising an audacious plan to send soldiers on ice skates across the frozen harbor. As Washington gamed out scenarios with his war council before committing to anything quite that risky, nothing got past the planning stage.
So the siege ground on. The civilian population melted out of the city as best they could, but many were trapped. The bitter winter claimed British sentries who froze to death where they stood. Unless help came for one side or the other, there was no end in sight.
The Guns of Ticonderoga
Enter Fort Ticonderoga. Up to Bunker Hill, and to a large extent even until March 1776, the war was largely confined to Massachusetts. The signal exception was a daring American raid that seized Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775. The fort sat at a strategically crucial point on the New York side of Lake Champlain, which served as the border between New York and Vermont, by the lake’s intersection with Lake George. Because it could menace the line of communications between Canada and the rest of the colonies, it was the site of a bloody siege in July 1758, in which the British lost a thousand men and suffered 1,500 wounded unsuccessfully attempting to dislodge the French from the fort (then known as Fort Carillon). The specter of that awful siege — the bloodiest battle in North America until the Civil War — haunted the British command once again (including General William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe, whose oldest brother died in the siege) after repeating similar losses assailing an entrenched position at Bunker Hill.
The British had neglected the place since the withdrawal of the French, who had blown up the fort’s powder magazine when they left. British planners weren’t thinking that a rebellion in Boston could threaten the road to Canada. The fort was in disrepair and lightly garrisoned by a few dozen substandard troops when Connecticut militia officer Benedict Arnold and Vermont’s Ethan Allen (leader of the Green Mountain Boys) captured it without a fight with fewer than a hundred men, then moved to seize all the ships on the lake.
The Americans initially tried to use the fort as a staging point for an invasion of Quebec in the fall and winter of 1775, with Arnold as second-in-command. It went disastrously, and news of the catastrophe reached Washington by mid-January. But the fort’s cannon, most of it leftover French artillery, still sat unused in their emplacements.
That’s where Henry Knox came in. Knox was an amateur soldier, a self-taught Boston bookseller and occasional tea smuggler who had spent five years in an artillery company of the Massachusetts militia but learned most of what he knew of war and soldiering from books, reading Caesar’s Commentaries and Plutarch’s Lives. An outgoing, beefy man who weighed nearly 300 pounds, Knox had testified as a witness at the Boston Massacre trial and was missing two fingers from a hunting accident. When Washington first met him in July 1775, he was designing fortifications for Roxbury after Bunker Hill.
Ultimately, Knox, Washington, and Nathanael Greene would be the only Continental Army generals to serve the entire war. Washington wrote in 1798, “There is no man in the United States with whom I have been in habits of greater intimacy; no one whom I have loved more sincerely, nor any for whom I have had a greater friendship” than Knox. Knox felt keenly his lack of military training, and in later life as the nation’s first secretary of war, he would be a key figure pushing for the foundation of a professional military academy. But in the summer of 1775, just turned 25, Knox had three important virtues for Washington: He understood artillery, he was willing to undertake anything, and unlike the army’s intriguers, he was totally loyal to the commander. As he was about to demonstrate, he also had the persistence, inventiveness, and endurance to pull off one of the greatest feats in American military history.
Knox suggested to Washington a daring plan: bringing Fort Ticonderoga’s guns to Boston. The besiegers, unwilling to face their own Bunker Hill, desperately needed more artillery to turn the tide. But the fort was over 300 miles away, much of that distance northward from Boston and over the Berkshire Mountains and into the Adirondacks. And it was winter.
On November 15, Knox left Boston, accompanied by his 19-year-old brother and carrying the cash needed to hire teamsters and supplies. He went south to New York City, then up the Hudson, reaching Fort Ticonderoga on December 5. The return trip would be another matter, hauling 120,000 pounds of artillery after lowering the guns from the fort’s stone walls. It took eight days just to get down Lake George, with boats sinking along the way and requiring the guns to be fished out. Knox arranged the construction of 42 sleds and sledges, to which the guns were lashed with more than half a mile of rope. The largest guns, including a 5,000-pound cannon that fired 24-pound shot, required eight horses and sometimes oxen to pull. The first task of each sled captain if a sled broke the ice was to cut loose the horses so they wouldn’t be pulled to the depths with the guns.
Over mountains, snow, and ice in terrain he had never seen before, Knox and his team drove on for a Biblical 40-day odyssey. He wrote of the Berkshires that he had “climbed mountains from which we might almost have seen all the kingdoms of the earth.” Hundreds of men and dozens of animals were engaged. Knox almost froze to death in a Christmas blizzard near Albany. He spent a full day fishing an 18-pounder cannon out of frigid water after it broke a 14-foot-wide hole in the ice and sank to the bed of the Mohawk River. None of this could be done in secret — Knox was greeted by townsfolk at many stops as if he were the circus coming to town — but with the bulk of British forces cooped up in Boston, the slow-moving “noble train” of artillery met no military resistance.
One Last Climb
On February 11, Knox returned to Washington’s camp, now promoted to colonel, with the guns parked at Framingham. He had not lost a single gun. The 58 guns of Ticonderoga quadrupled the artillery at Washington’s disposal. But how to use them?
The obvious place for the guns was the Dorchester Heights, 112 feet high and commanding a view of Boston. In spite of their conspicuous strategic value, eight months had passed since Bunker Hill with neither side willing to hazard occupying the heights while exposed to the other’s fire. Washington’s spies reported that General Howe stood ready to march out of Boston and give battle if the Continental Army tried to take the heights.
Now, it was worth the risk — but only if the guns could mount the hill without the British noticing. Easier said than done with 60 tons of guns and ground on the heights frozen “impenetrable as rock” so that nothing could be entrenched. The Americans developed a two-pronged plan. First — the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Putnam, a cousin of General Israel Putnam and a self-taught surveyor — the patriots would prefabricate fortifications and bring them and the guns up the hill in the dark in a single night, with wagon wheels wrapped in straw to muffle the sound. Second, to keep the British from noticing, under Knox’s command the Continental artillery (including a few of the Ticonderoga guns kept in reserve) would bombard Boston for three days from Roxbury, Cobble Hill, and Lechmere Point.
The British took the bait, firing their own cannons in return to add to the din. Three-thousand men crossed a low-lying causeway, a path that would have been in full view of the British guns, screened only by a wall of hay bales. On the morning of March 5, the sixth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, the shocked British awoke to find the American guns pointed at their positions and their ships in the harbor. Washington, adding bluff to surprise, had rows of earth-filled barrels at the front of the American line, partly for show but also so they could be rolled down the hill at any British force daring enough to scale the heights (as the British had done at Quebec during the last war).
Still, nobody knew if it would work. Washington, who had chafed at repeated vetoes of his plan to cross the ice, now had 4,000 men led by Greene and General John Sullivan to lead that assault if the British stood their ground against the guns. The patriot hospital in Cambridge prepared thousands of bandages and called in extra nurses and beds for what was expected to be a bloodbath. General Howe’s first instinct was to fight, but bad weather forced him to cool off long enough to consider evacuating the city in favor of a base in New York — a step he’d been pondering all winter, but for which he had too few transport ships.
With enough of the fleet now in the harbor or on the way, Howe could make his escape, but he had no intention of doing so under fire. So he offered Washington a deal, and an ultimatum: let him go and Boston would be Washington’s; fight, and he would burn Boston to ash, as the British had already done to much of Charlestown. Washington hated to let his enemy escape his grasp, but he had the morale of American cities to consider, and there was no guarantee that a Carthaginian end to Boston would be the end of the war. He agreed to Howe’s terms, and the British evacuated under a flag of truce on what today is called Evacuation Day. After eight years of British occupation of Boston, not a single official of the British Crown was left in Massachusetts.
Washington was hailed for the first time as a conquering hero, with Congress striking a medal in his honor and Harvard awarding him an honorary degree. Knox was on his way to a three-decade career as one of America’s leading generals. The war would move south. Boston would remain free: It has never again been occupied.