SIEGE AND EVACUATION OF BOSTON.

PRINTED IN THE UNITARIAN REVIEW, MARCH, 1876.

CAN

AN we easily ascribe too much historical importance to the siege of Boston? It is true that, measured by the number of men employed and the munitions of war expended, it was not a great event. It is equally true that no brilliant military movements marked its course, unless, indeed, we except from this statement the occupation of Dorchester Heights. Neither did anything tragic lend to its closing hours pathetic interest. It was its real significance, the consequences which hung on victory or defeat, which have kept it fresh in the world's memory. When the army under Washington settled down on the hills which girt Boston, the question was not, Shall a petty provincial town be cleared of military intruders, or shall the little colony of which it is a part be permitted henceforth to govern itself according to its chartered rights? The problem was weightier: Should the foundations of this Western republic be laid in that generation, or wait a more favorable hour?

The assertion is a strong one, but it has in it at least. the elements of probability. New England was then, for various reasons, the heart of the Revolution. Mercantile in grain, a system of mediæval monopolies called on the English statute-book Navigation Laws had pressed like lead upon the neck of her commerce. Long before 1775 there was a great and wide discontent

within her borders. But the people who endured this wrong were of the stock of those Puritans who, from religious faith and political convictions alike, held that there were limitations both to royal and legislative power. They were of the same race as the men who drew the sword at Naseby and Marston Moor to defend legal rights, who sent Charles I. to the scaffold, and drove his son James across the narrow channel, to be the object of the cold compassion and half-concealed scorn of all Europe. Besides, perhaps on this earth never was there so homogeneous a people as that which tilled the rough farms of New England, or clung to her rock-bound shores. As a result of all this, when new and intolerable burdens were laid on the Colonists, and the hour for action had come, New England was ready, and she presented a united front. The Tories, who southward almost neutralized the power of the patriots, here were so insignificant in numbers and influence that they were swept from the path of the Revolution without an effort. Add, now, that in the town of Boston was a knot of men whose boldness, prophetic insight, and political decision were wellnigh miraculous, and whose faculty of arousing masses to resistance was only equalled by their gift of imparting to that resistance order and irresistible method, and you can readily understand that New England was ripe for revolution, as the rest of the confederacy was not ripe; that Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill, and the long suspense around beleaguered Boston, were all needed to weld the widely scattered Colonies into one people. It seems probable, sometimes it seems certain, that had Great Britain, at the outset, appreciated the nature of the crisis, and put forth the whole of her mighty strength, and annihilated or led into captivity

that first American army, she would have brought a pause to the Revolution which might have lasted a lifetime. It is therefore impossible to award the siege of Boston too high a place in the list of those events which have exercised a permanent influence in human history.

The men of 1775, from Maine to Georgia, understood this. The unconscious recognition of the providential position of the little Puritan town is one of the most striking features of the history of the period. Here was a handful of fourteen or fifteen thousand people not more than enough to make a respectable shire town crowded into a narrow peninsula, whose surface was scarcely larger than a good farm; the inhabitants of a town around whose history no venerable traditions had gathered; a town not known as a central mart of commerce, or as a great seat of learning or art; beautiful for situation, but not beautiful from rich private mansions, or stately public edifices; marked only by one proud distinction, the heroic devotion of her sons and daughters to the principles of true freedom. Yet towards this little town all eyes and hearts were turned. And when the British Ministry, by the Boston Port Bill, shut up her harbor, destroyed her commerce, brought her rich men to poverty, and her poor men to the verge of starvation, they only crystallized sentiments of sympathy into deeds of brotherly kindness. Private purses were opened for her relief. Neighboring towns offered to her distressed citizens the shelter of rural homes. Every town and village in the Province, and every Colony outside it, strained their resources for her support. It takes a volume to record the offerings. Marblehead, rival seaport, scorns to profit by her neighbor's misfortune.

She asks Boston merchants to use her wharves and storehouses as though they were their own. Maine sends her coasters laden with hundreds of cords of wood. Connecticut drives thither great droves of thousands of sheep. The Middle and Southern Colonies pour from their granaries corn and rye and wheat and flour by thousands of barrels and tens of thousands of bushels. South Carolina from her swamps gathers up a great, generous donation of rice, and with sympathy and patriotism, richer yet, sends it as her offering of good will. Some special instances are peculiarly interesting. Wethersfield, Connecticut, taxes her people one penny in a pound to support the poor of Boston. Temple, a little village, not ten years old, of a dozen or two families, nestling among the hills of New Hampshire, gladly gives fifty bushels of rye, the product of farms just won by hard labor from the primeval forest. Even the Indians of Martha's Vineyard feel the common pulsation, and proffer their gift. While from the adjoining hamlets the most varied supplies fresh vegetables, potatoes, turnips and cabbages, pork, salt fish, butter and cheese, clothing and shoes, and even tobacco to cheer the weary heart were carted over Boston Neck. Never, perhaps, in the world's history was there a more remarkable uprising of sympathy and generosity.

And it is not to be forgotten that at the bottom of this generosity was the feeling that Boston was the vanguard, if not the forlorn hope, of liberty; that in her peril and in her utter desolation she was fighting the battle for all the rest, a feeling how well expressed in a letter from a town in Connecticut to her selectmen! "As Boston has been the first to explain, assert, and vindicate the rights of America, and detect and

hold up to public view, stripped of every color and disguise, the wicked plans devised against her, her glory would have been incomplete had she not been the first to suffer in the common cause. We presume not to advise. We admire and applaud your constancy." Any review, therefore, of the siege of Boston would be incomplete which did not recognize the fundamental fact that this was one of the decisive events of history. The siege of Sebastopol may be forgotten. For, although hundreds of thousands were gathered to that feast of blood, and courage and skill were lavished without stint, nothing final was achieved. But the leaguer of New England's capital will not be forgotten; for the half-armed, half-disciplined militia who starved out, or intrenched out, the royal army, then and there settled that there was to be an America.

But when did the siege of Boston really commence ? Was it in those days succeeding the nineteenth of April, when the farmers from all the New England States came hurrying seaward, and with no real commander-in-chief, and with little or no plan of action, seated themselves upon the hills, and with military instinct began to intrench themselves? Or was it on that third day in July, when under the historic elm at Cambridge there stood a man of grand face and form, who took command of these irregular levies, and where disorder had been introduced method, and reinforced rude courage and patriotism with military skill and foresight? It would be far nearer the truth to say that the siege began the hour that General Gage landed with despotic instructions and almost vice-royal powers. For never was he governor in Massachusetts one foot beyond the girdle of the flashing bayonets of his