King George Page 5

  John and Samuel thought this was ridiculous. Wasn’t it obvious by now that King George was never going to compromise? It was time for the thirteen colonies to join together, form one big army, and fight for independence.

  In fact, John had decided that this was the day that he would try to convince Congress to pick a leader for the new American army. But who should that leader be? He wanted Samuel’s advice. The cousins knew their friend John Hancock expected to be offered the job. And Hancock was definitely one of the most famous and popular Patriot leaders. The thing is, Hancock didn’t know anything about leading an army. That could be a problem.

  Besides, the cousins agreed, the American army should represent all regions of the colonies. The perfect thing would be to pick a leader from Virginia, the biggest of the southern colonies. That would help unite Americans in the long fight ahead. If only there was someone from Virginia, someone known and respected by everyone, someone with army experience, someone smart, tough, committed to the cause … . .

  John Adams Loses a Friend

  “When Congress assembled, I rose in my place,” said John Adams. It was time, Adams told Congress, to create a Continental army, with soldiers from all thirteen colonies. And it was time to elect a leader of the army. Members leaned forward in their seats. Who was Adams about to name?

  John Hancock listened with a proud grin on his face. He really thought he was about to hear his name.

  And John Adams enjoyed toying with Hancock a little bit. He made sure to keep an eye on Hancock’s face as he named the man he believed. should command the Continental army: “George Washington.”

  Hancock’s smile collapsed in an instant. “I never remarked a more sudden and striking change of countenance [facial expression],” Adams said. Then Samuel Adams announced that he too supported Washington, which upset Hancock even more. “Mr. Hancock never loved me so well after this event as he had done before,” John Adams remembered.

  Meanwhile, George Washington jumped up and ran out of the room. He wanted to give everyone a chance to talk about him without worrying they might hurt his feelings.

  So Washington waited outside while the other members of Congress decided whether or not he should lead the American Revolution.

  George Washington, Love Poet

  Was George Washington, age forty-three, about to be offered the opportunity of a lifetime? Or was he about to be handed an impossible job? Possibly both? He must have wondered about this as he waited in the library.

  As a boy in Virginia, George had dreamed of becoming a military hero. He even tried to run away from home and join the British navy when he was fourteen. But his mother discovered the plan and refused to let him go. She was a very protective mom—and a bit stingy,too. Young George once asked her for money so he could take music lessons. She offered to lend him the cash.

  So George never learned to play the violin. But he did spend some time working on his love poetry. Here’s part of a letter he sent to Francis Alexander, a young woman he admired (notice that the first letters of each line spell out her name):

  “From your bright sparkling eyes, I was undone; Rays, you have more transparent than the sun, Amidst its glory in the rising day, None can you equal in your bright array …”

  On June 16, 1775, George Washington sat down to write a very different letter. This time he was writing to his wife, Martha (or, as he called her in his letters, “my dear Patsy”). Congress had just made it official: George Washington was the commander of the new Continental army.

  “I am now set down to write to you on a subject which fills me with inexpressible concern,” wrote George to Martha. “It has been determined in Congress, that the whole army raised for the defense of the American cause shall be put under my care.”

  Why was Washington filled with concern? How would you feel if the future of an entire country were placed in your hands? Washington told Congress, “I this day declare, with utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command.”

  Young George

  But there was no time for doubts or worries. Washington packed up his things and headed north to join the army, which was camped outside of Boston. While he was on his way, a messenger brought Washington some urgent news: a major battle had just been fought in Boston. When he heard the report, Washington said—Wait a second, let’s check on the battle first. Then we’ll hear what Washington said about it.

  A Little Elbow Room

  The last time we were in Boston was two months ago, just after the battles of Lexington and Concord. The British soldiers were trapped in town, surrounded by thousands of American militiamen.

  That was still the situation in June 1775, when a new team of British generals arrived from London. One of the generals, John Burgoyne, was shocked to see a bunch of angry farmers holding the mighty British army in a trap.

  “What! Ten thousand King’s troops shut up? Well, let us get in, and we’ll soon find elbow room.”

  John Burgoyne

  So the British decided to get themselves a little elbow room. The first step was to seize control of Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill, two hills above Boston. From this high ground, they could start blasting away at the American camp.

  But remember all those Patriot spies in and around Boston? They learned the British plans and got the news to the American soldiers. And the Americans beat the British to the hills.

  Get Ready for a Long Day

  Peter Brown was one of about twelve hundred Americans who spent the night of June 16 on Breed’s Hill, building a fort of earth and logs. “We worked there undiscovered till about five in the morning,” Brown later told his mother. After a tense and tiring night of work, the men were ready for bed. “Fatigued by our labor,” he explained, “having no sleep the night before, very little to eat, no drink but rum … we grew faint, thirsty, hungry, and weary.”

  But there was no rest in sight. When the sun rose, the British looked up at Breed’s Hill. They were used to seeing cows and sheep grazing up there. Now, all of a sudden, there was a fort! They quickly began blasting cannons up at Breed’s Hill. “The enemy fired very warm from Boston and from on board their ships,” Peter Brown reported.

  Colonel William Prescott, the American commander on the hill, saw the rising fear in his men’s eyes. Most of these guys had never been in a battle before. Prescott tried to keep them calm by walking up and down on the top of the fort’s walls—he wanted to show them it was safe.

  It wasn’t safe.

  A cannonball came bouncing into the fort and took off a man’s head. “He was so near me,” Prescott remembered, “that my clothes were besmeared with his blood and brains, which I wiped off, in some degree, with a handful of fresh earth.”

  None of the men had ever seen anything this awful before. It was about to get worse. The men looked down and saw more than two thousand British soldiers gathering below Breed’s Hill.

  The Battle of Bunker Hill

  The British starting marching up the hill. Colonel Prescott knew his men had only about fifteen rounds of ammunition each. Knowing they would have to make every shot count, Prescott gave the guys some famous last-second advice:

  William Prescott

  “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.”

  If you think the Americans had it bad, though, look at it from the British point of view. The British soldiers were now hiking uphill through thick grass, carrying 125 pounds of equipment under a blazing sun.

  They were marching in nice, neat rows (making themselves easy targets) because the generals considered that the most “honorable” way to fight. And they were marching right up to the front of the American fort.

  All over Boston, thousands of people stood watching from church steeples and the roofs of houses.

  The British soldiers marched to within about one hundred feet of the fort, and they kept coming. Ninety feet, eighty feet, seventy … then the American guns exploded. The British were blown backwards. A British officer named Francis
Rawdon said: “They rose up and poured in so heavy a fire upon us that the oldest officers say they never saw a sharper action.”

  The Americans cheered and waved their hats as the surviving British soldiers tripped down the hill.

  The British officers told their men to turn around and attack again. They were driven back down the hill a second time. So the British charged up the hill a third time. And they finally captured the fort, though at an awful cost—one thousand British soldiers were shot that day.

  Even though most of the fighting took place on Breed’s Hill, this battle became known as the battle of Bunker Hill. No one seems to know why. The important thing is that the Americans were proud of the battle of Bunker Hill (though when you get driven out of your fort, that counts as a loss). Facing those brutal British charges gave the Americans badly needed confidence. They really could stand toeto-toe with the British.

  Washington Takes Command

  “The liberties of the country are safe!”

  That’s what George Washington said when he heard the news from Bunker Hill. Like everyone else, he had been worried that untrained American volunteers would not stand their ground in the face of a fierce British attack. Now he knew better.

  Then Washington got a look at his new Continental army. And he started worrying again.

  Washington found about 20,000 men crowded into a stinky, dirty camp of tents and shacks. These guys were not used to doing laundry (they considered it women’s work) so they just walked around in filthy, rotting clothes. There were serious shortages of guns, ammunition, and fresh food. And soldiers from different colonies were too busy fighting each other to think about attacking the British. That winter one snowball fight between soldiers from Massachusetts and Virginia exploded into a thousand-man fistfight. Washington personally plunged into the mess and started yanking people apart.

  As he tried to discipline his army, Washington found himself giving some strange orders. “The general does not mean to discourage the practice of bathing while the weather is warm enough to continue it,” Washington told his soldiers. “But he expressly forbids it at or near the bridge in Cambridge.” Why is that, General?

  “It has been observed and complained of, that many men, lost to all sense of decency and common modesty, are running about naked upon the bridge whilst passengers, even ladies of the first fashion in the neighborhood, are passing over it.”

  Yes, getting these guys to behave was going to be a real challenge.

  Bored in Boston

  Meanwhile, the British army was still bottled up in Boston. There was very little to eat that winter, and nothing to do. Lieutenant Martin Hunter remembered one way the men tried to fight the boredom. “Plays were acted twice every week by the officers and some of the Boston ladies,” he said.

  George Washington

  One night the British actors were about to put on a new “farce,” or comedy—it was a play that made fun of Americans as clowns and cowards. British soldiers dressed up as Americans and got ready to take the stage.

  The Americans knew about the play (thanks to those spies again). They decided to have some fun. Just as the show was about to start, American soldiers started firing at a British fort in town.

  Inside the playhouse, one of the British actors (dressed as an American) ran on stage and shouted for silence. He announced that the rebels were attacking! But the audience started laughing—they thought this was part of the show.

  “The whole audience thought that the sergeant was acting a part in the farce,” Martin Hunter reported, “and that he did it so well there was a general clap, and such a noise that he could not be heard again for a considerable time.”

  The soldier kept shouting that this was a real attack. Finally realizing the danger, the audience members all stood up and started racing around in a panic, jumping over chairs, stepping on fiddles. The actors called out for water to wash the makeup off their faces. When they got out to the fort, they realized they had been tricked. The Americans were not really attacking Boston.

  And Stay Out!

  The next time it wasn’t a trick.

  On the morning of March 3, 1776, British general William Howe (who had taken over command from General Gage) pulled out his telescope and looked up at some nearby hills called Dorchester Heights. He saw cannons pointing down at him. “These fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months!” cried Howe.

  Actually, it had taken more than one night to get those big guns in place. These were the cannons captured that May by Ethan Allen at Fort Ticonderoga. Washington had wanted the guns in Boston, so he sent Colonel Henry Knox to go get them. Knox was an enormous twenty-five-year-old bookstore owner who loved to read books about cannons. In the Continental army, that made Knox a cannon expert (they didn’t have any real experts).

  Using sleds and teams of oxen, Knox and his men pulled about sixty cannons three hundred miles from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. Washington had them placed on Dorchester Heights.

  Suddenly General Howe decided it was time to leave town. The truth is, it’s no fun living in a city with huge guns pointing down at you. The British sailed out of Boston on March 17, 1776.

  And they never came back.

  When Washington happily reported the good news to Congress, he included a special note to John Hancock, whose Boston mansion had been used by British officers. “I have a particular pleasure in being able to inform you, Sir,” wrote Washington to Hancock, “that your house received no damage worth mentioning. Your furniture is in tolerable order and the family pictures are all left entire and untouched.”

  The only bad news was that someone had stolen Hancock’s backgammon set.

  Independence Time?

  A writer named Mercy Otis Warren celebrated the liberation of Boston by writing a new play called The Blockheads. It was a comedy about the British army in Boston, and she gave the British characters silly names like General Puff and Mr. Shallow. In the play, cowardly British officers were terrified of the Americans. Here’s a sample:

  General Puff: You see, gentlemen, our situation. Our enemies are gaining on us hourly! One night more perhaps will make us their prisoners!

  Mr. Shallow: Why will you desire us to go to battle? Are you for seeing another Bunker Hill … ?

  Mercy Otis Warren’s good friend Abigail Adams was hoping there would be more good news to celebrate in 1776. She was convinced that it was time for the colonies to officially declare independence from Britain. In fact, she was wondering what her husband, John, and the other members of Congress were waiting for. “I long to hear that you have declared an independency,” wrote Abigail. John replied:

  “As to declarations of independency, be patient.”

  How long would Abigail have to be patient? That’s the next story.

  John Adams

  Declare Independence, Already!

  Here’s the big question of 1776: Are you for or against independence from Britain? You can put Benjamin Franklin down in the “for independence” column. After a lifetime of success as a writer, inventor, diplomat, and founder of colleges, libraries, fire departments, and about forty other things, Ben Franklin was the most famous American in the world. And now, going strong at age seventy, he was serving in Congress and urging the younger members (they were all younger) to make the break from Britain.

  Anything for the Cause

  Just how strongly did Benjamin Franklin feel about American independence? He would do almost anything for the cause—even share a tiny bed with John Adams. This happened one night when the two men were traveling together on important business for Congress.

  “But one bed could be procured for Dr. Franklin and me,” Adams explained, “in a little chamber little larger than the bed, without a chimney and with only one small window.”

  Both men put on their nightshirts and climbed into the narrow bed. They tried to get comfortable. But Adams felt a cool breeze and he noticed the window was open. He always got col
d easily. So he jumped up to shut the window. Franklin cried out, “Oh, don’t shut the window! We shall be suffocated!”

  Adams tried to explain that he was afraid the chilly night air might make him sick. But this was nonsense, Franklin insisted. “Come, open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you,” said Franklin. “I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.”

  There was no point arguing with Franklin. So Adams left the window open, leapt back into bed, and pulled the covers up to his chin. Then Franklin began a very long lecture on air and breathing and the true causes of colds … . .

  To Adams, this was better than any bedtime story. “I was so much amused,” Adams recalled, “that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together.”

  Your Turn, Paine

  So John Adams and Ben Franklin couldn’t share a bed peacefully. But they could agree that it was time for the thirteen colonies to declare themselves a free and independent country. What about the other three million colonists? Many of them still weren’t convinced that independence was such a great idea. After all, they were proud to be part of the British Empire. What would it be like to be an American citizen? No one really knew how that would turn out.