Decisive Day by Richard M. Ketchum

Author:Richard M. Ketchum [Ketchum, Richard M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466879508
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

It is difficult to imagine anyone who could have been spared less easily by the Provincial Congress and Committee of Safety than Joseph Warren, but Warren operated on the theory that major generals were supposed to fight, and since he was a newly commissioned one, minutes after the alarm sounded in Cambridge he was heading toward Charlestown with young Dr. Townsend, one of his medical students. Along the way someone must have recognized him and given him a horse, for two of his friends subsequently reported that Warren had overtaken them on horseback, exchanged greetings, and disappeared down the Charlestown Road. He reached the Neck between two and three o’clock when the British cannonade was at its height, and made his way up the northwest side of Bunker Hill, where he found another of his students, William Eustis, on duty as a surgeon. James Brickett, who had led the ailing James Frye’s regiment onto the hill the night before, was there also; he had been wounded slightly, and had left the redoubt in order to serve on Bunker Hill as a physician. When he learned that Warren was planning to fight, he gave him his musket.

Putnam caught sight of Warren and came over to ask for orders, but the doctor refused, saying he had come as a volunteer. (Even in all the din and confusion, the contrast between these two must have occasioned a smile from the soldiers: Warren the man of intellect, tall and handsome in his best clothes; Old Put the man of action, his shirt sleeves rolled up and a battered hat on his head.) After asking where he could be of most use, Warren went out to the redoubt, where Prescott also offered to relinquish his command. Again Warren refused, saying, “I have no command here; I have not received my commission”; and before taking his place in the line, he added a graceful word about how he would consider it a privilege to fight under Prescott.

Another volunteer who apparently showed up about this time was Seth Pomeroy, a veteran of the Indian wars, who had gone home to Northampton for a few days’ rest and hurried back when he heard that Charlestown was threatened. He had started riding east at noon the day before, and a story is told of his arrival at the Neck on a borrowed horse; he watched the balls flying across the narrow strip of land, then handed the reins to a bystander, saying it was “too valuable an animal to be shot,” and walked out to Bunker Hill. Pomeroy was seventy years old and a recently elected general of the Massachusetts Army, but like Warren, he had not received his commission, and turned aside Putnam’s offer of command. Supposedly he went down the hill to join John Stark’s men at the rail fence, and, loading the gun he had made himself and carried thirty years earlier at the siege of Louisbourg, awaited the British attack.

While waiting for his reserve, William

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