The King's Town

The light came up behind him out of the sea, and Boston came up out of the dark in front of him, a roof at a time, and he sat his horse on the top of the hill and watched it come and did not let anybody see what he felt.

The works were done. He had not believed they could be, and they were. Two redoubts on the two hills, a little ragged in the grey light, built of things that had not been on the hill at sundown: the timber frames that Rufus Putnam, the engineer, had thought of, laid on the frozen ground and filled with bundles of brushwood, because the ground was frozen a foot and a half down and no man could dig it; gabions, fascines, an abatis of felled orchard trees with the branches sharpened; and along the forward slope, in a line, barrels filled with stones and earth, to be set rolling down on the first men who tried to climb up. Below him, across the neck of land from Roxbury, ran a wall of hay, hundreds of bales of it, pressed tight and stacked to screen the road from the town; and on the road, all night, under the moon, three hundred and more ox-carts had gone up and down with the oxen’s hooves muffled and the drivers walking at their heads.

Some two thousand men had done it between seven in the evening and four in the morning, in silence, while his guns at Cobble Hill and Lechmere Point and Roxbury fired into the town for the third night running to give the King’s army something else to listen to. He had ridden over at midnight to see, and stayed. He had not been able to make himself go back to Cambridge and wait for a report.

Below him the town was waking. Smoke from chimneys. A bell somewhere, early. On the water beyond the town the King’s ships lay at anchor, the admiral’s ship and the frigates and the transports, and he could see men on their decks, small as pins, moving about in the ordinary way of men at the start of a day; and he knew the exact moment when the first of them looked up at the hill. It was like watching a man read a letter and come to the line that matters.

He turned in the saddle to the men nearest him, who were filthy and grey with cold and had not slept, and said what he had been meaning to say since midnight, and said it short, because he had never been able to make speeches and did not try.

“Remember what day it is,” he said. “It is the fifth of March.”

They knew what that meant. Every man in Massachusetts knew. Six years ago that night the King’s soldiers had fired into a crowd in King Street and killed five people, and the town had kept the day since with an oration and a bell; and he heard the word go back along the works from man to man, the fifth of March, the fifth of March, and saw them straighten.

He had not meant it as revenge, whatever they took it for. He had meant it as a date. Things had a way of happening on the same days in this country, as though the country were keeping accounts, and he had thought that the King’s army ought to be shown, on the morning of the anniversary, a hill that was not there the night before.

Knox came up the hill at seven, enormous in a greatcoat, with his maimed hand in its silk handkerchief and his face red with the cold and the climb and pure joy, and stood beside the General’s horse looking down at the town where he had kept a bookshop until last summer.

“They can see us, sir,” he said. “I watched them see us. There was a fellow on the Long Wharf with a glass who dropped it.”

He was twenty-five. He had read every book on gunnery in his own shop and sold the rest, and in the dead of the winter he had gone three hundred miles to Ticonderoga with a commission and a list, and come back over the mountains with fifty-nine pieces of artillery on sledges drawn by oxen, through snow and across rivers that were not as frozen as they looked, without losing a gun. Washington had never known a man take so much pleasure in a thing done well. He found that he could not look at Knox’s face for long; it made him want to laugh, and a general who laughed on a hill in front of the enemy at sunrise would be reported.

“Then let them look,” he said, and Knox grinned like a boy and went off down the line to see to his guns.

---

He had been forty-four on the twenty-second of February, and he had been at Cambridge for eight months, and for most of them he had expected to fail.

In July he had found sixteen thousand men with elected officers and powder for nine rounds each, a shortage they discussed openly. He kept them through the autumn by continuous indignation. On the last day of December their enlistments expired. On New Year’s morning he watched an army half that size form under him on Prospect Hill.

They had hoisted a flag that morning, for the new army: thirteen stripes, red and white, for the thirteen colonies, with the Union of Great Britain in the corner, because that was what they were. It had been flown at Philadelphia already, on the Congress’s ships. It meant what it said. It said that the men under it were the King’s subjects, in arms for their rights, and not foreigners and not rebels; and he had looked up at it in the cold wind and thought it the truest thing the Congress had yet devised, which was not saying a great deal.

And the same week the King’s Speech had come out of Boston, in print, sent across the lines by the King’s army as a courtesy, and the King had said that he had received the petition as coming from his subjects; and the regulars in the town, looking out across the Back Bay at that flag with the Union in its corner going up on Prospect Hill, had taken it for the army’s loyal answer. A sign of submission, they had called it, in the letters that came out afterwards. Joy in Boston. He had written to Reed in Philadelphia that they had given the regulars great joy without in the least intending it, and had laughed, writing it, for the first time in a month.

The Canadian letters arrived in January: Montgomery dead, Arnold wounded, four hundred prisoners. He had sent Arnold himself. He walked in the Cambridge garden for an hour, then returned to the desk and reported it to Congress. At dinner he said nothing.

In February the bay had frozen, and he had wanted to take the army across the ice into Boston in one night and finish it. He had put it to a council of his generals, and they had heard him out and told him, very respectfully, that it would be a massacre, and that the men had not the powder for it, and that if he would wait for Knox’s guns there might be a better way; and he had been angry, and had taken their advice, and written to Reed that he had been overruled, and had been right to be. It was not a thing he had ever found easy, being right to be overruled.

But he had thought about the flag since. He thought about it now, on the hill, with the town in front of him. The regulars in Boston had not been entirely wrong. That was the trouble. The flag did mean that. The army under it did belong to the King, in the only sense the Congress allowed it to say out loud, and was going to spend this morning, if Howe came out, killing as many of the King’s soldiers as it could reach.

He was a Virginian and a vestryman of the Church of England, and every Sunday of his life, at Pohick and at Alexandria, he had knelt while the clergyman prayed for the King’s most excellent Majesty, and said the amen, and meant it. He had not stopped meaning it. In the last war he had wanted a King’s commission more than he had wanted anything, and had worn himself out in letters asking for one, and been refused, because he was a colonial and the King’s officers did not take colonials, however well they fought. He had never quite forgiven that. He had never once, either, doubted whose subject he was.

The Congress called the regulars in Boston the ministerial army. It was a good phrase. It meant that the army was the ministry’s and not the King’s, and that the men fighting it were the King’s loyal subjects defending themselves against his ministers. He used the phrase himself, in his orders, because it was the Congress’s phrase and he was the Congress’s general. He had never been able to make it feel like anything but a phrase.

---

Howe did not come out in the morning.

The King’s guns tried. The batteries in the town opened on the hill soon after it was light, and went on all morning, and could not reach; the hill was too high for them, and he watched the gunners down on the wharves digging in the trails of their pieces to get the elevation, and the shot falling short into the mud of the flats, and felt something very like sympathy. Then the ships tried, and did no better. Then the firing stopped, and through the glass he watched the boats begin to gather at the Long Wharf, one and two at a time and then by dozens, and the red coats going down into them in files, and the boats pulling out across the harbour towards Castle William, which lay under the hill.

So Howe would come. He felt his heart lift and despised himself a little for it, and let it lift anyway.

He had wanted this since July. He had wanted Howe to come up a hill at him, as Howe had come up Breed’s Hill in June, in the open, in lines, against men behind earth; and Howe had been too sensible to do it, all winter, and now it seemed Howe was going to do it after all, on the fifth of March, against two thousand men behind brushwood and barrels of stones and the guns of Ticonderoga. He sent for more men. By the afternoon there were nearly six thousand on the hill and the slopes behind it. Across the river at Cambridge, old Putnam had four thousand more in boats, waiting for the signal to cross the Back Bay and go into the town by the other side the moment Howe had emptied it of soldiers to send at the hill. It was the best plan he had made in the war. It might have ended the war.

He thought, standing in the wind on the forward slope with the glass to his eye: and then what?

He had not let himself think it before. If the King’s army were beaten on this hill and Howe captured with all his regiments, what then? He would have taken the King’s town from the King’s army in the King’s name. He would write to the Congress, and the Congress would write to the King, very humbly, that his Majesty’s faithful subjects had been obliged in their own defence to capture his Majesty’s army; and the King, who had received the last paper as coming from his subjects, would receive this one too.

He could not see the end of it, and he did not like noticing that he could not.

In the afternoon the wind got up.

By five o’clock it was blowing hard from the south and the boats going out to Castle William were making heavy weather of it. By dark it was a gale, and then something worse than a gale, with rain and sleet and hail driving across the hill so hard that the sentries could not face into it and the men crouched behind their brushwood with their backs to it and their coats over their heads. The sea got up in the harbour. He could hear it, all night, breaking on the flats below, and once a sound he thought was a boat going over. Nobody came up the hill. Nobody could have.

In the morning the storm was still blowing, and the boats were back at the Long Wharf, and the red coats were going back up into the town in files, and he stood on the hill with the water running off his hat and understood that he was not going to get his battle.

He found, to his considerable surprise, that he was relieved.

---

On the eighth a flag came out of the town to the lines at Roxbury, with a paper from the selectmen of Boston.

It was not addressed to him. It was not signed by Howe. It said, in the careful language of men who had spent a winter learning what could be said in an occupied town, that the selectmen had been given to understand that General Howe intended to leave the town with his army; that he had no intention of destroying it, unless his troops were molested in their departure; and that they begged, as men whose houses and families were in it, that nothing might be done to bring that about.

He read it in his room at Cambridge with the fire going and read it again.

The selectmen’s paper bound Howe to nothing. An answer would make Washington a party to terms he had no authority to conclude. Congress was a week away. He instructed his officer to reply that the paper was neither addressed to the general nor authenticated, and could therefore receive no notice.

He moved the guns down to Nook’s Hill, where they could reach the wharves, and kept them silent. Howe loaded his ships and left the town unburned. Every morning Washington asked whether the embarkation continued. Every morning it did. Nothing passed between the commanders to acknowledge the arrangement. He thought it the most civilised thing that had happened since he came to Cambridge, and could not have said why it frightened him.

---

They went on the seventeenth, which was a Sunday.

He watched from the hill. All morning the boats went out from the wharves, loaded down to the gunwales, and the transports in the harbour filled and settled and made sail one after another, and went down the harbour to the roads, and the town behind them grew quieter and quieter until it was entirely still. A hundred and twenty sail. He had them counted. The regiments went last, in good order, with their colours, as he would have expected of them; and with them went the people who had chosen to go: a thousand or more of the King’s friends in Boston, with their families and their servants and as much of their furniture as the transports would hold, and the rest of their lives left standing behind them in the streets with the doors locked.

He had thought he would feel triumph. He felt, mostly, that he was watching a family leave a house.

They were Americans too, he kept coming back to that, watching the transports go down the harbour: the King’s subjects, going away with the King’s army, from the King’s subjects. The Congress would call them Tories. They were leaving their houses behind them, and he wondered who would have charge of the empty rooms.

The men in the works on the hill cheered as the last sails went down towards the castle, and he let them, and did not join in, and rode down off the hill in the afternoon without saying very much to anybody.

---

He went into the town on the Monday.

His officers had taken the first regiments in the day before, only men who had had the smallpox, because there was smallpox in the town and he could not afford to lose an army to it now. They had found what armies find. Houses pulled down for firewood, whole streets of them. The trees on the Common cut. The great elm at the corner of Essex Street, that the town had called the Liberty Tree, cut down for fuel in August, fourteen cords of it, so they told him. The Old South meeting-house, where the town had met to decide about the tea, with its pews torn out and its floor spread with earth and tan, and a bar set up in the middle of it for leaping, because the King’s light dragoons had used it all winter as a riding school. He stood in the gallery and looked down at it for some time without saying anything. Then he went out.

He rode down King Street at the end of the day, with two of his officers and a crowd beginning to gather behind him, to the old State House at the head of it.

It stood where it had always stood, at the top of the street, brick and white, with its tower and its balcony; and on the gable at the east end, above the balcony, the lion and the unicorn of the royal arms stood up gilded against the evening sky, exactly as they had stood the night the soldiers fired in the street below them, and through the tea, and through the siege. Nobody had taken them down. The regulars would not have; they were the King’s. The town had not been able to; it had been inside the lines all winter. And now the town was open, and the King’s army was gone, and there was nobody left whose business it was.

A man in the crowd, an elderly man in a good coat, came up to his stirrup and asked, with the air of somebody asking on behalf of a committee, whether the General would wish the arms taken down.

He looked up at them for a long time. He had driven the King’s army out of the King’s town, in the King’s name, without a battle, and the King’s arms were still on the King’s town-house, gilded, in the last of the light, and he did not know what that made him.

“That is a matter for the town,” he said.

He turned his horse and rode back up King Street through the crowd, and the arms stayed where they were.