Revolutionary War: Northern Theater

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Revolutionary War: Northern Theater

The Powder Keg. However intricate the political causes of the American Revolution, the military flashpoint was a simple matter. On the night of 18 April 1775 the governor of Massachusetts, Gen. Thomas Gage, sent a column of troops under Lt. Col. Francis Smith and Maj. John Pitcairn to seize weapons and gunpowder stored by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress at Concord, some sixteen miles west of Boston. Early in the morning of the nineteenth, Pitcairn, pushing ahead with six companies to secure the bridges over the Concord River, encountered on the town green at Lexington a local company of militia captained by John Parker. Pitcairn ordered them to disperse. A single shot was fired, nobody knows by whom, and the British troops fired several volleys into the colonials, killing eight of them and wounding ten. The colonials scattered; Smith came up with the rest of the troops; and the British moved off toward Concord. There Smith destroyed what stores the colonials had not spirited away and turned back for Boston. Word of the massacre had spread and militiamen swarmed to the attacked, sniping at the column of redcoats from behind trees and stone walls along the route. At Lexington, Smith found Lord Hugh Percy and 900 men come to reinforce him. These troops provided even more targets for the angry colonists, who harassed their march all the way back to Boston. The British commanders did what they could, detaching small parties to chase snipers and burn houses that had sheltered them, but at the end of the day the British casualties amounted to 73 killed, 174 wounded and 26 missing while only 93 patriots were killed or wounded.

The Siege of Boston. Soon the Massachusetts Provincial Congress decided to raise a force of 13,600 militia under Gen. Artemas Ward to be sent to surrounding colonies for assistance. Within days a force of nearly 17,000 colonists was camped in an arc around Boston, besieging the British garrison of about 3,500. Soon generals William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton arrived in Boston with reinforcements. Realizing that the peninsula on which Boston stood could be bombarded by artillery placed on the heights of either Dorchester to the south or Charlestown to the north, they planned to seize both those places. On 17 June they woke to find that 1,200 colonists had fortified Breed’s Hill on Charlestown. By midafternoon, British troops had been ferried across the harbor and drawn up in lines to attack the patriot redoubt. As they advanced up the hill, Loyalists on Boston’s roof-tops and in the rigging of ships set up a cheer. Patriot fire discipline was excellent. Col. William Prescott had told them, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” so that the British were within fifty yards of the fortifications when the first Patriot volley tore into them. The British renewed the attack with similar results. They began ferrying reinforcements across the harbor, aghast at the sight of veteran regiments fleeing in panic. General Howe lost every

man on his staff. At length, the colonists ran out of ammunition and the British swept the position. The Americans had paid a steep price in this erroneously named Battle of Bunker Hill, with 140 killed, 271 wounded, and 30 captured, but the British had 226 dead and 828 wounded, an appalling casualty rate. Now the whole world knew that colonial militia could stand up to British regulars in battle. By July, George Washington had arrived in Cambridge as the new American commander in chief. On 4 March 1776 he made the move the British had feared, placing cannon atop Dorchester Heights and beginning to bombard the city and the British fleet. On 17 March the British evacuated Boston.

Attacks on Canada. As soon as hostilities began, colonials in the New England area began operations against Canada. They had suffered attacks from that direction over more than a century and they felt sure that Canada would serve as a staging area for the British army. On 10 May, less than a month after the battles of Lexington and Concord, Col. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, a Vermont militia regiment, surprised and captured Fort Ticonderoga on Lake George in upstate New York. Two days later they seized nearby Crown Point on Lake Champlain. By August an American force was heading into Canada from Ticonderoga, capturing the town of St. John’s on the Richelieu River on 2 November and marching into Montreal eleven days later. Joining up with a force that Col. Benedict Arnold had marched up from Boston through Maine, the colonials attacked Quebec on 31 December 1775 but were repulsed with heavy losses. Arnold besieged the city until May and retreated to Montreal. Another attempt on Quebec met defeat at Trois Rivières in June 1776 and the Americans had to retreat from Canada. These rash actions had forestalled any invasion from Canada in 1776, and the guns of Fort Ticonderoga, manhandled across New York and Massachusetts by troops under Col. Henry Knox, had been used in the siege of Boston.

New York City. As soon as the British were out of Boston, Washington guessed that they would move against New York as a means of cutting off New England from the rest of the colonies, and he hurried south to fortify it. By the time that General Howe arrived at Staten Island on 2 July 1776 with thirty-two thousand troops, Washington had constructed fortifications on Brooklyn Heights, Governor’s Island, and lower Manhattan. His army numbered only about eighteen thousand men, one-half of them in Brooklyn, the other in Manhattan. When Howe ferried twenty thousand men to Long Island, Washington fought them European-style on open ground. Many of his officers

were unused to command, and some of the militia panicked. The Battle of Long Island went down as a British victory, with the colonials losing more than one thousand men. The fortifications on Brooklyn Heights were now untenable, and Washington had to evacuate Long Island. In thirteen hours he managed to bring nine thousand men with their artillery and supplies across the East River to Manhattan Island, a brilliant feat. Washington himself was the last American to embark. Unable to defend New York effectively, Washington soon withdrew northward to Harlem Heights and was gradually pushed farther north by Howe. By November he was re-treating southward through New Jersey and Howe was settling into winter quarters in New York. On the day after Christmas, Washington surprised the Hessians at Trenton, winning a great victory, but the British were safely in control of New York and able to make it their headquarters for the rest of the Revolution.

THE EVACUATION OF BOSTON

After the evacuation of Boston by British troops and Tory civilians on 17 March 1776, this bleak portrait of the aftermath of the event was noted in a letter written on board a British ship lying just outside Boston Harbor, and printed in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser on 6 May:

One hundred and forty vessels, great and small, are arrived in this road from Boston, in the most distressed condition that can possibly be described, with General Howe, his army, and about 1500 inhabitants (friends to the government) of that place. Where they are bound to, we are at a loss to know. Certain it is, however, they are all drove from Boston by General Washington’s army, after a cannonading of fourteen days, whereby one third of the town was destroyed, and a number of the King’s troops killed, and a great many much wounded, owing chiefly to the quantity of shells the Provincials kept continually pouring into the town. The English troops, and the Tories, embarked on board the above vessels in the greatest disorder and confusion pen cannot describe, leaving behind two month’s provisions, a large quantity of cloathing belonging to the regulars, a number of puncheons of rum, together with the artillery, cannon, and the greatest part of the ammunition. General Howe left seven men of war at Boston, one of which, by some accident, ran on shore, and it is feared the crew are made prisoners, and the vessel, with all her cannon and stores, fallen into the possession of the Provincials.

Source: Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1968), pp. 291-292.