Rick Atkinson - The British Are Coming

He had little recourse but to husband his gunpowder, stockpile firewood, and launch an occasional raid or sniping sortie with the ten companies of riflemen Congress had sent from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Unlike muskets, rifle barrels were grooved to spin bullets for greater stability and accuracy. A capable marksman might hit a bull’s-eye at two hundred yards, although the weapon was slower to load; the projectile had to be wrapped in a greased linen patch and painstakingly “wanged” down the tighter bore. Moreover, no bayonet had yet been invented that would fit over a rifle muzzle. Riflemen were lethal and exotic, happily demonstrating their sharpshooting prowess while firing from their backs, or while running, or with trusting comrades holding targets between their knees. Many wore fringed hunting shirts, moccasins, and even Indian paint. Throngs of admiring civilians turned out to cheer them as the long-striding companies made their way toward Cambridge. They also proved maddening to their commanders, their boorish or insubordinate behavior sometimes leading to arrests and shackles. “Washington has said he wished they had never come,” General Ward told John Adams on October 30. Lee called them “damned riff-raff—dirty, mutinous, and disaffected.” Still, a Washington aide reported that rifle fire so unnerved the British “that nothing is to be seen over the breastwork but a hat.” A Yankee newspaper warned, “General Gage, take care of your nose.”

But General Gage had gone, and he took his nose with him. In late September, Scarborough arrived in Boston with orders summoning Gage home, a decision made soon after the news of Bunker Hill reached London. The king had insisted that the general’s feelings be spared by pretending that he was being recalled to plan the 1776 campaign. Gage packed his personal papers in white pine boxes and, after a flurry of salutes, sailed aboard the transport Pallas at nine p.m. on October 11. He was soon forgotten, both in America and in England, though he continued to draw a salary as the Crown’s governor of Massachusetts. Horace Walpole joked that he might be hanged for the errors of his masters.

William Howe moved into Province House as the new “general and commander-in-chief of all His Majesty’s forces within the colonies laying on the Atlantic Ocean from Nova Scotia to West Florida inclusive, etc., etc., etc.” Major General Howe’s sentiments on the occasion could not be discerned, for he remained relentlessly taciturn—“never wastes a monosyllable,” Walpole quipped—the better to hide his indecision. Now forty-six and thickset, with bulging eyes and a heavy brow, he bore an uncanny resemblance to his monarch, perhaps because his mother was widely rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of George I. His father, a viscount and the governor of Barbados, had died young in 1735. William Howe’s eldest brother, George, deemed “the best officer in the British Army,” had also died young, from a French bullet at Fort Carillon in 1758; in gratitude, Massachusetts paid £250 for a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. A second brother, Richard, succeeded to the viscount’s title and was now an admiral. William emerged belaureled from the French war, not least for his celebrated climb up a St. Lawrence River bluff to reach the Plains of Abraham—“laying hold of stumps and boughs of trees,” a witness reported—during Britain’s capture of Quebec. Family lore held that he returned to England clad in buckskin and moccasins, to be known thereafter to his siblings as “the Savage.”

Elected to Parliament from Nottingham, the Savage advocated restraint in colonial policy and vowed never to take up arms against his American kinsmen—even as he privately advised Lords North and Dartmouth that he was willing to do precisely that. When orders came to report to Boston, he told a constituent that he “could not refuse without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serving my country in a day of distress.” He added assurances that “the insurgents are very few in comparison to the whole of the people.” Although he rarely spoke, was often wrong when he did, and seemed averse to advice, the manly if morose Howe was a welcome change within the ranks after Old Woman Gage. “He is much beloved by the whole army,” a captain wrote. “They feel a confidence in him.”

Howe now had some eleven thousand mouths to feed, and little to feed them. “What in God’s name are ye all about in England?” an officer wrote in a letter published at home. “Have you forgot us?” Hospitals remained jammed with men suffering from wounds, scurvy, dysentery, and other maladies. “I have eat fresh meat but three times in six weeks,” a lieutenant wrote. Rebel whaleboats chased loyalist fishing smacks from coastal waters, severing supplies of cod, haddock, and terrapin. Bad mutton cost a shilling a pound; a skinny goose, twenty shillings. Salt meat was the inevitable staple, though said to be “as hard as wood, as lean as carrion, and as rusty as the devil.” General Percy reportedly killed and roasted a foal for his table, while one Winifried McCowen, a camp retainer, took a hundred lashes across her back for stealing and butchering the town bull. A Boston man wrote that he had been “invited by two gentlemen to dine upon rats.”

With each passing day, the blockade grew more oppressive. “They are burrowing like rabbits all around us,” wrote Captain Glanville Evelyn, now commanding a light infantry company encamped in leaky tents on Bunker Hill. “There’s nothing reconciles being shot at … so much as being paid for it.” General Burgoyne was in high dudgeon. “Our present situation is a consummation of inertness and disgrace,” he wrote. “Driven from one hill, you will see the enemy continually retrenched upon the next.… Could we at last penetrate ten miles, perhaps we should not attain a single sheep or an ounce of flour, for they remove every article of provisions as they go.” By Howe’s calculations, to move 32 regiments beyond Boston would require 3,662 horses—plus nearly 50 tons of hay and oats daily to feed them—and 540 wagons. That was almost 3,000 horses and 500 wagons more than he had.

Shifting the army by sea from Boston to New York had been discussed since midsummer. Burgoyne listed eight good reasons to make the move, including the large trove of loyalists there, access to food and forage on Long Island, and control of the Hudson valley corridor to Canada. But permission from London had been late in arriving, as usual, and now the season was too far advanced for a safe passage, given stormy weather, rebel pirates, and the lack of a single secure harbor between Boston and New York. Howe did some more arithmetic: unless five thousand regulars were left to hold Boston, complementing the twelve thousand needed in New York, at least a thousand Crown officials and loyalists would also have to be transported, along with £300,000 in goods, which, Burgoyne urged, “ought on no account to be left to the enemy.” Such an exodus would require far more British shipping than was currently available. Inevitably they would have to winter in Boston, as one private wrote, “like birds in a cage.”

Badly fed birds, at that. “Starve them out” had been a Yankee rallying cry since April. Britain had never maintained a large army several thousand miles from home without buying local food and fodder; living off the land by plunder was generally impossible for armies in the eighteenth century, even when the land was accessible. To sustain the fleet, in the coming months the Navy and Victualling Boards would hire far more transport tonnage than in the last French war, and that did not include ships needed by the Treasury and Ordnance Board bureaucracies responsible for feeding army troops abroad. As Cardinal Richelieu, the great French statesman during the Thirty Years’ War, had warned, “History knows many more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies.”