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A History | The American Revolution: First Phase | The Outbreak
The Outbreak
The First Continental Congress meeting at Philadelphia on
September 5, 1774, addressed respectful petitions to Parliament and king but also adopted nonimportation
and nonexportation agreements in an effort to coerce the British Government into repealing the offending
measures. To enforce these agreements, committees were formed in almost every county, town, and city
throughout the colonies, and in each colony these committees soon became the effective local authorities,
the base of a pyramid of revolutionary organizations with revolutionary assemblies, congresses, or
conventions, and committees of safety at the top. This loosely knit combination of de facto governments
superseded the constituted authorities and established firm control over the whole country before the
British were in any position to oppose them. The de facto governments took over control of the
militia, and out of it began to shape forces that, if the necessity arose, might oppose the British in
the field.
In Massachusetts, the seat of the crisis, the Provincial Congress, eyeing Gage's force in Boston, directed
the officers in each town to enlist a third of their militia in minutemen organizations to be ready to act
at a moment's warning, and began to collect ammunition and other military stores. It established a major
depot for these stores at Concord, about twenty miles northwest of Boston.
General Gage learned of the collection of military stores at Concord and determined to send a force of
Redcoats to destroy them. His preparations were made with the utmost secrecy. Yet so alert and ubiquitous
were the patriot eyes in Boston that when the picked British force of 700 men set out on the night of
April 18, 1775, two messengers, Paul Revere and William Dawes, preceded
them to spread the alarm throughout the countryside. At dawn on the 18th of April when the British arrived
at Lexington, the halfway point to Concord, they found a body of militia drawn up on the village green.
Some nervous finger whether of British Regular or American militiamen is unknown to this day pressed a
trigger. The impatient British Regulars, apparently without any clear orders from their commanding officer,
fired a volley, then charged with the bayonet. The militiamen dispersed, leaving eight dead and ten wounded
on the ground. The British column went on to Concord, destroyed such of the military stores as the Americans
had been unable to remove, and set out on their return journey.
By this time, the alarm had spread far and wide, and both ordinary militia and minutemen had assembled along
the British route. From behind walls, rocks, and trees, and from houses they poured their fire into the
columns of Redcoats, while the frustrated Regulars found few targets for their accustomed volleys or
bayonet charges. Only the arrival of reinforcements sent by Gage enabled the British column to get back to
the safety of Boston. At day's end the British counted 273 casualties out of a total of 1,800 men engaged;
American casualties numbered 95 men, including the toll at Lexington. What happened was hardly a tribute to
the marksmanship of New England farmersit has been estimated 75,000 shots poured from their muskets that
day but it did testify to a stern determination of the people of Massachusetts to resist any attempt by
the British to impose their will by armed force.
The spark lit in Massachusetts soon spread throughout the rest of the colonies. Whatever really may
have happened in that misty dawn on Lexington Green, the news that speedy couriers, riding horses to
exhaustion, carried through the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia was of a savage, unprovoked British
attack and of farmers rising in the night to protect their lives, their families, and their property.
Lexington, like Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor, furnished an emotional impulse that led all true patriots
to gird themselves for battle. From the other New England colonies, militia poured in to join the
Massachusetts men and together they soon formed a ring around Boston. Other militia forces
under Ethan Allen of Vermont and Benedict
Arnold of Connecticut seized the British forts at Ticonderoga
and Crown Point, strategic positions on the route between New York and Canada. These posts yielded valuable
artillery and other military stores. The Second Continental
Congress, which assembled in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, found itself forced to turn from embargoes
and petitions to the problems of organizing, directing, and supplying a military effort.
Before Congress could assume control, the New England forces assembled near Boston fought another battle
on their own, the bloodiest single engagement of the entire Revolution. After Lexington and Concord, at
the suggestion of Massachusetts, the New England colonies moved to replace the militia gathered before
Boston with volunteer forces, constituting what may be loosely called a New England army. Each state
raised and administered its own force and appointed a commander for it. Discipline was lax and there was
no single chain of command. Though Artemas Ward, the Massachusetts commander, exercised over-all control
by informal agreement, it was only because the other commanders chose to co-operate with him, and decisions
were made in council. While by mid-June most of the men gathered were volunteers, militia units continued
to come and go. The volunteers in the Connecticut service were enlisted until December 10, 1775, those from
the other New England states until the end of the year. The men were dressed for the most part in homespun
clothes and armed with muskets of varied types; powder and ball were short and only the barest few had
bayonets.
Late in May Gage received limited reinforcements from England, bringing his total force to 6,500 rank and
file. With the reinforcements came three major generals of reputationSir William
Howe, Sir Henry Clinton, and Sir John Burgoyne men destined to
play major roles in England's loss of its American colonies. The newcomers all considered that Gage needed
more elbowroom and proposed to fortify Dorchester Heights, a dominant position south of Boston previously
neglected by both sides. News of the intended move leaked to the Americans, who immediately countered by
dispatching a force onto the Charlestown peninsula, where other heights, Bunker Hill
and Breed's Hill, overlooked Boston from the north. (Map) The
original intent was to fortify Bunker Hill, the eminence nearest the narrow neck of land connecting the
peninsula with the mainland, but the working party sent out on the night of June 16, 1775, decided instead
to move closer in and construct works on Breed's Hilla tactical blunder, for these exposed works could much
more easily be cut ok by a British landing on the neck in their rear.
The British scorned such a tactic, evidently in the mistaken assumption that the assembled "rabble
in arms" would disintegrate in the face of an attack by disciplined British Regulars. On the afternoon
of the 17th, Gage sent some 2,200 of his men under Sir William Howe directly against the American positions,
by this time manned by perhaps an equal force. Twice the British advanced on the front and flanks of the
redoubt on Breed's Hill, and twice the Americans, holding their fire until the compact British lines were
at close range, decimated the ranks of the advancing regiments and forced them to fall back and re-form.
With reinforcements, Howe carried the hill on the third try but largely because the Americans had run short
of ammunition and had no bayonets. The American retreat from Breed's Hill was, for inexperienced volunteers
and militia, an orderly one and Howe's depleted regiments were unable to prevent the Americans' escape.
British casualties for the day totaled a staggering 1,054, or almost half the force engaged, as opposed to
American losses of about 440.
The Battle of Bunker Hill (for it was Bunker that gave its name to a
battle actually fought on Breed's Hill) has been aptly characterized as a "tale of great blunders
heroically redeemed." The American command structure violated the principle of unity of command
from the start, and in moving onto Breed's Hill the patriots exposed an important part of their force
in an indefensible position, violating the principles of concentration of force, mass, and maneuver.
Gage and Howe, for their parts, sacrificed all the advantages the American blunders gave them, violating
the principles of maneuver and surprise by undertaking a suicidal attack on a fortified position.
Bunker Hill was a Pyrrhic victory, its strategic effect practically
nil since the two armies remained in virtually the same position they had held before. Its consequences,
nevertheless, cannot be ignored. A force of farmers and townsmen, fresh from their fields and shops,
with hardly a semblance of orthodox military organization, had met and fought on equal terms with a
professional British Army. On the British this astonishing feat had a sobering effect, for it taught
them that American resistance was not to be easily overcome; never again would British commanders
lightly attempt such an assault on Americans in fortified positions. On the Americans, the
effect was hardly sobering, and in the long run was perhaps not salutary. Bunker Hill, along
with Lexington and Concord, went far to create the
American tradition that the citizen soldier when aroused is more than a match for the trained
professional, a tradition that was to be reflected in American military policy for generations afterward.
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