The First American Army Read Free Page B

and sword dangling from his waist, the teenaged fifer had a premonition that something was going to happen in Boston. He alternately walked and ran back to the camp, sleeping at a farmhouse on the way.
    “At dawn I heard the firing of great guns,” he wrote in his memoirs of June 17, “which caused me to quicken my pace. I thought it was my duty to be there.”
    The fifer arrived at Cambridge Common, a mile from Breed’s and Bunker Hill, amid unbridled chaos. “Everywhere the greatest terror and confusion seemed to prevail,” he wrote. Greenwood headed through the scattered crowds of frantic, shouting residents, some on foot, some in carriages, and some reigning in their horses, and all of the wounded soldiers stumbling toward the common. Greenwood ran toward the slope of Breed’s Hill while the battle was still in progress. He passed an African American soldier who had been badly wounded. “His collar being open and he not having anything on except his shirt and trousers, I saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back,” Greenwood wrote.
    Greenwood asked the soldier if his wound hurt, and the man said that it did not and that once he had a bandage wrapped around his neck to stem the bleeding he would go back to the battle. The teenager had been frightened, but now a remarkable calm came over him. He wrote, “I began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment, and fear never troubled me afterward during the whole war.”
    Greenwood left the wounded man and hurried toward Breed’s Hill, looking for his regiment. In the tumult of the morning, he ran directly into his mother, who had been racing around the commons looking for him. His mother, who left Boston with a pass, begged him to return to his uncle’s home on Cape Cod. “Don’t go there,” she said, looking toward Bunker and Breed’s Hills. “You’ll be killed!” Her son told her that he had to find his regiment and left.
    Halfway to Breed’s, he located the regiment, stationed on a road with two cannon. Captain Bliss, his commander, was surprised that the boy had returned. Greenwood explained that he had raced toward the action when he heard the sound of the guns in the early morning. The officer smiled down at him.
    “I was much caressed by my captain and my company, who regarded me as a brave little fellow,” wrote the teenager, whose morning amid the carnage at Bunker Hill began his long and dangerous journey as a soldier in the first American army.

Chapter Two

THE SIEGE OF BOSTON, 1775–1776:
Private Greenwood Joins an Armed Camp
    P rivate John Greenwood, one of the youngest enlisted men in the Continental Army, heard his first fife and saw his first British soldier at the same time. Like many Bostonians, he watched the arrival of two regiments of immaculately uniformed British regulars, the Fourteenth West Yorks and the Twenty-Ninth Worcesters. They came in their red coats and bright brass buttons at the city’s Long Wharf on October 1, 1768, following a London decision to place troops there after the civil unrest of the previous few years.
    The British regiments left their ship and assembled smartly on the wide, lengthy wooden pier with its long row of shops and warehouses and marched through town on the main thoroughfare, King Street, to the grassy field that served as the Boston commons. They were led by their regimental fife and drum band, which played martial music to impress the large crowd of colonial onlookers that had gathered to watch them parade to the commons.
    The Bostonians, angry at their arrival, glowered at them as they walked by. In the groups of people scattered along the route to the commons stood young Greenwood, then just eight years old, who was fascinated by the men playing the high notes on the fife. He moved from block to block, following them along King and past Cornhill Street, winding his way between people or jumping up and down to see the band as it marched by.
    Shortly afterwards,