The First American Army Read Online Free PDF Page B

As soon as she walked into his office his aides peppered her with questions about the size of the American army and its weapons and supplies. She apparently abandoned the conversation she planned to have with the British general under the barrage of queries. Angry that the officers were trying to pry information out of her, she snapped at Gage about his soldiers, “We are ready for them any time they choose to come out and attack us!”
    She had reacted as a patriot, and as any mother of a soldier. Mrs. Greenwood was, however, a lone American Daniel in the middle of a Redcoat lion’s den. The officers were incensed at her reply and shouted at her, but Gage paid them no heed. He just waved them out of the room and told her to return to her home.

    Greenwood and the rest of the men in the army were eager to attack the British army. “For danger, we knew none,” Greenwood bragged. Washington wanted to do so badly and planned an attack across the harbor at night, but his generals vetoed the idea.
    In the winter of 1776, Washington decided that he could use a battery of cannon to shell the British from Dorchester Heights, a peninsula south of Boston that looked down at the city across the harbor he faced. The army did not have many cannon and none large enough to fire heavy cannonballs that far.
    To the rescue came the improbable Henry Knox. The portly Knox, who weighed close to two hundred eighty pounds, had been a bookseller before the war and had read, he claimed, just about every book ever written on artillery. He had become head of the Continental Army’s artillery and told Washington that he would go to Fort Ticonderoga, in New York, with a regiment of men and transport the guns there to Boston. To do so, Knox and the soldiers had to move cannon out of the fort, cross Lake George on boats, cross the Hudson River, and take the field pieces nearly three hundred miles in winter, over snow covered roads and in severe weather. It seemed like a task of Biblical proportions, but Knox and his men did it. Using forty-two wooden sleds, eighty yoke of oxen, and a small fleet of ships, Knox transported the guns from Ticonderoga to Boston in less than three weeks and gave Washington his needed firepower.
    Washington ordered the cannon, protected by hundreds of bales of hay, placed on the heights in the middle of the night so that the men doing the work would not be seen and wind up as targets for British sentries. It was an enormous job undertaken on the evening of March 4. The completion of the work took three thousand men under General John Thomas, laboring all night, but by the first light of morning the hill was completely fortified.
    Greenwood was on the heights that next morning, peering down at Boston across the water, a target he believed would be rather easy to shell for the more than two dozen guns Knox had mounted on the hills. The British were wary of the guns as soon as sentries spotted them after the sun rose that morning. They felt like sitting ducks. The English planned to storm Dorchester Heights in a flotilla of small boats, but an unforeseen storm arose on the night of the invasion and they had to give up the assault. Greenwood had looked forward to an attack. He wrote, “If they had succeeded in landing they would certainly have been overpowered, for it was a steep hill and the Americans had a number of hogsheads and barrels filled with sand to roll down upon them, and intended to sally out of the fort upon them when in confusion and they would have liked no better fun.”
    The British did not like the “fun” the Americans provided on the night that their insulting play,
Blockade of Boston
, written by General Burgoyne, was staged in January at their fort on top of Bunker Hill. The British army presented the drama to mock the American forces, but there was an extra, unwritten act in the script.
    As the play commenced at about 9 p.m., Greenwood, fife in his waistband, was summoned along with fifty other men to