The First American Army Read Free

near the rear of the hill, toward a low stone wall and wood fence below the breastworks that seemed lightly defended because there was no firing coming from it.
    Howe and his officers did not realize that Colonel John Stark and others had instructed their men behind the wall to withhold their fire until the Redcoats were close enough to hit with some accuracy. They were also instructed to shoot the officers to cause confusion and prevent orders from being heard.
    When the intimidating Fusiliers, four abreast, bayonets fixed, trotted within fifty yards of the wall, the Americans opened up. The sound of the volley—it seemed that every musket was fired at once—could be heard throughout Boston.
    The fury and force of the gunfire stunned the British. Stark had been right. At that close distance the muskets were lethal. Officers were hit and went down. The first line of men, instead of continuing up the slope toward the Americans, halted and tried to exchange fire with their muskets; this caused the second line to walk right into them. They were all easy targets for the Americans. Some of the British soldiers pitched forward, dead, and the men next to them fell backwards, musket balls lodged in their heads and chests, blood spurting everywhere. Those behind and around them were hit and killed or wounded and went down. Screams filled the air. Howe’s vision of one single charge to drive the Americans off the hill and back to Charlestown evaporated in a roar of muskets, the air filled with the flames of the guns discharging and a rising cloud of smoke. Howe’s own trousers were splattered with the blood of his men.
    On the southern side of the hill, a similar outcome occurred as the Americans unleashed a thunderous musket volley that cut into the British army approaching the earthworks and the redoubt, a wooden wall that protected them. The British were decimated. Their regulars were not only easy targets, but Howe had so many of them, 1,550, and they were positioned so close together that musket balls missing one soldier hit the man next to him or behind him.
    The British were also advancing through grass that hid large rocks and deep holes. Soldiers tripped on the impediments and fell, sometimes bringing down those near them. Others tripped over their bodies as they tumbled. Their formations came apart in minutes and their legendary ability to maneuver on the battlefield was thwarted. As they tried to stand or help each other, they were hit with yet another volley of fire from the provincials behind the breastworks on top of Breed’s Hill. Orders shouted by the English army officers were drowned out by the screaming of the wounded lying in the grass, the triumphant shouts of the rebels, and the sounds of the muskets. Blood flew everywhere in the hot afternoon air, and the British, shaken, retreated back down the hill.
    The Americans had held. The enlisted men, especially, felt satisfaction in repulsing the first charge of the British up the slope with, as a spectator said with some pride, “a hot fire.” 3 First Lieutenant Samuel Webb, fighting on Breed’s, wrote that “cannon and musket balls were flying about our ears like hail” but that the Americans did not flinch and that, in fact, “our men were in fine spirits.” Captain Samuel Ward, too, was proud of himself and his men, writing that he had been “where the bullets had flew several times without showing many marks of fear.” 4
    Robert Steele, a drummer boy, wrote after that assault that “the conflict was sharp, but the British soon retreated with a quicker step than they came up, leaving some of their killed and wounded in sight of us . . . came up again and a second battle ensued which was harder and longer than the first. [There] was great noise and confusion.” 5
    That was Howe’s second assault, that he ordered with newly arrived Sir Henry Clinton, another general, at his side. The general had underestimated the Americans but he was certain that a