Episode 22: The Siege

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode 22: The Siege

Written by Jim Ambuske, Ph.D.
Published December 23, 2025

JIM AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE 

Rachel Revere last saw her husband, Paul, on the night of April 18, 1775 when he briefly came home to 19 North Square in Boston. A long night lay ahead.

AMBUSKE 

Paul had just returned from the Old North Church, where he had directed a fellow rebel to hang two lanterns in the steeple, to warn colonists across the river in Charlestown that British soldiers were moving by water from Boston to the mainland and then on to Lexington and Concord. Now he was headed west to warn local communities that the “regulars are coming out.”

AMBUSKE 

Paul grabbed his boots and his overcoat, said the words he needed to say to his wife, took one last look at his children, and then vanished into the night.

AMBUSKE 

And then, Rachel was alone. 

AMBUSKE 

Rachel and Paul had been married for less than two years by that April night, when the silversmith raced ahead of the Redcoats sent by General Thomas Gage to find and destroy arms, ammunition, and military supplies in the town of Concord. By the morning, several of the king’s subjects would be dead, many more would be wounded, and Massachusetts Bay would be in open rebellion.

AMBUSKE 

Tragedy had brought the Reveres together. In May 1773, Paul’s first wife, Sarah Orne, passed away at the age of thirty-seven. Five months earlier, Sarah had given birth to their eighth child, a baby girl named Isannah. As it is in our own time, child birth in the eighteenth century was both a moment of great joy and a moment of great danger. Whether Sarah succumbed to an ailment related to Isannah’s birth is difficult to know, but Isannah herself was sickly and would not live to see her first birthday. Paul became a grieving widower with six surviving children.

AMBUSKE 

Paul met Rachel Walker in the months after Sarah’s passing. Perhaps they already knew of each other, or at least, she knew of him from his engraving of the Bloody Massacre on King Street on that cold March night three years earlier. Or from silver pieces in her family’s home. In a town of 16,000 people, a town that was on all but an island in these years, most everyone knew everyone. 

AMBUSKE 

Second marriages were not uncommon in this world, especially when surviving spouses had large flocks of children to tend or an advantageous match could advance one’s wealth and social standing.

AMBUSKE 

By all accounts, though, Rachel and Paul’s courtship in the summer of 1773 was an affectionate one. He charmed her with poetry, calling her the “Fair One nearest my Heart.” In October, they were married. Paul made their silver rings himself. Inside Rachel’s, he engraved the words, “Live Contended.”

AMBUSKE 

Rachel settled into Paul’s home at 19 North Square. Rachel was now step-mother to six children. The oldest was a teenager, the youngest just a toddler.

AMBUSKE 

Paul’s wish that Rachel might “Live Contended” with him in their home became a challenging one to fulfill in the months after their wedding in October 1773. 

AMBUSKE 

The destruction of East India Company tea in Boston Harbor that December brought retribution from Parliament in the form of Coercive Acts that shuttered the town’s port and remade the colony’s government.  

AMBUSKE 

Colonists tarred and feathered customs officials who dared to uphold the law. More Redcoats arrived in town and found quarters on the Commons, the warehouses, and private homes. The masts of more warships appeared in the harbor.  

AMBUSKE 

The port’s closure made getting food and goods more difficult. Paul’s known association with the Sons of Liberty made him a target.

AMBUSKE 

A Continental Congress in Philadelphia gathered to find a way out of the imperial crisis while calling for greater resistance to Parliament by boycotting British goods and empowering intrusive local committees to enforce compliance.

AMBUSKE 

Some British Americans began calling themselves “Loyalists,” others “Patriots,” and yet confusingly, all professed fealty to George III as their rightful and lawful king.

AMBUSKE 

Provincial militia began drilling with vigor in the countryside, watching the army’s movements in town. 

AMBUSKE 

And then the regulars marched out of Boston on the night of April 18, 1775. And then Paul stopped at home before riding out to warn the regulars were coming out.

AMBUSKE 

And then, Rachel was alone.

AMBUSKE 

By the afternoon of the next day, everyone in Boston, in the surrounding towns, and even in some neighboring colonies knew what had happened in Lexington and Concord. Even if Bostonians hadn’t yet heard the full tale, the sight of breathless and wounded regulars told them all they needed to know. 

AMBUSKE 

So did the scene that night. For as darkness fell, Rachel and her children, Bostonians as well British regulars, Loyalists as well Patriots, freeman as well as the enslaved, could see a ring of lights flickering in the distance, encircling the town: The campfires of 20,000 provincial soldiers, militiamen, and ordinary colonists who had raced toward Boston on the heels of the retreating regulars.

AMBUSKE 

War had come, the rebels had the high ground, and Boston was now a town under siege. 

AMBUSKE 

I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution.

AMBUSKE 

 Episode 22: The Siege 

AMBUSKE 

On April 22, 1775, three days after the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, General Thomas Gage dashed off a short letter to Lord Barrington, the Secretary at War, in London.

AMBUSKE 

Gage acknowledged Barrington’s own letter from two months earlier, one informing him that George III had named Major Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne to commands in the colonies. The commander-in-chief of British forces in North America dispensed with the acknowledgement in just a few brief words, and then, almost as if it was an afterthought, Gage offered an equally brief reflection on recent events, one that began:

THOMAS GAGE 

“​​I have now nothing to trouble your Lordship with, but of an Affair that happened here on the 19th. Instant.”

AMBUSKE 

Gage’s terse report of 137 words to the Secretary at War betrayed little of what had really transpired on Lexington Green or in the town of Concord, nothing of the intense clash between the king’s subjects in both hamlets, nor of the running firefight between regulars and militiamen back down the road to Boston.

AMBUSKE 

But to Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Thomas Gage, as Governor of Massachusetts Bay, offered a franker, and fuller report, one that concluded with an ominous warning:

Thomas Gage 

“The whole Country was assembled in Arms with Surprizing Expedition, and Several Thousand are now Assembled about this Town threatning an Attack, and getting up Artillery. And we are very busy in making Preparations to oppose them.”

RICK ATKINSON 

The outbreak of the war really demonstrates another crucial way we should consider our revolution, and that is, it's a civil war. It's only a revolution because it's on your favorite win. My name is Brad Jones. I'm a professor of history at the California State University Fresno. The reality is that in 75 a civil war is happening. British subjects are fighting. British subjects killing each other. If you're living in a place like Boston or New York, you're literally having to make the decision to possibly have to kill your neighbor, kill a cousin, people that you know, people that you've grown up with. In these moments, they're not fighting against an absent King, tyrannical king. Subjects are being asked to fight against one another.

AMBUSKE 

Confronting those difficult choices also meant confronting what it meant to be British and what it meant to be loyal.

ATKINSON

The great iron for the start of this war is that American colonists go to war against Great Britain, not because they're American or they're arguing for a new definition of a people. They're saying we're actually the Protestant British subjects here. We're the ones trying to stand up for the very values and ideals that we've argued made us a people over the last half century, it's you guys that have turned into something else that's a really powerful, intoxicating narrative that really strengthens this kind of budding Patriot cause, this idea of loyalist or loyalism that merges in the same period. At the start of the war, they struggle, what's it mean to be a loyalist.

AMBUSKE 

And in Boston, a town now under siege by rebelling British Americans, and in communities elsewhere in the colonies, the king’s subjects faced an equally difficult and more immediate question. Now that Britons had fired on each other at Lexington and Concord, what would happen next? 

AMBUSKE 

So, how did the king’s subjects navigate life in a besieged Boston? And how did the outbreak of war transform a provincial problem into a continental crisis? 

AMBUSKE 

To begin answering these questions, we’ll first head to Boston, to pass back and forth between British lines in the early days of the siege, to follow some colonists struggling to get in, and others trying to get out. We’ll then travel south to Philadelphia, to the meeting of the Second Continental Congress, to create a Continental army and appoint a commander-in-chief, Before returning to the capital of Massachusetts Bay, to advance with British regulars up Breed’s Hill, to win a pyrrhic victory at terrible costs.

AMBUSKE 

In weeks before General Gage ordered Lt. Colonel Francis Smith, Major John Pitcairn, and their men to seize and destroy arms and ammunition in Concord, the British army had fortified Boston Neck, the small sliver of land that connected the town to the mainland. With tensions rising, and fearing a possible attack by provincial militia drilling just outside town, Gage ordered the neck reinforced to prevent an assault and control movement in and out of Boston by land.

AMBUSKE 

By then, some of the town’s inhabitants had already left for the mainland, but within hours of the fighting at Lexington and Concord, the British had doubled the guard and sealed off the neck. No one, without a proper pass, could get in or out of Boston, trapping thousands of residents inside town. 

AMBUSKE 

In letter to a friend in London, Ann Hulton, the sister of customs commissioner Henry Hulton, described the tense, bewildering, and frightful hours after Lexington and Concord:

ANNE HULTON 

“The next day the Country pourd down its Thousands, and at this time from the entrance of Boston Neck at Roxbury round by Cambridge to Charlestown is surrounded by at least 20,000 Men, who are raising batteries on three or four different Hills. We are now cut off from all communication with the Country & many people must soon perish with famine in this place. Some families have laid in [a] store of Provisions against a Siege.”

AMBUSKE 

The merchant John Rowe chronicled these precarious early moments in his diary.

JOHN ROWE 

“All Business at an end & all Communication Stop’d between the Town & Country. No Fresh Provisions of any kind brought to this market so that Boston is in a most Distress Condition.”

AMBUSKE 

Hulton wasn’t sure who she could trust or from where the next attack would come.

ANNE HULTON 

“We are threatend that whilst the Out Lines are attacked[,] with a rising of the Inhabitants within, & fire & sword, a dreadful prospect before us…For several nights past, I have expected to be roused by the firing of Cannon…at present a Solemn dead silence reigns in the Streets, numbers have packed up their effect, & quited the Town, but the General has put a Stop to any more removing, & here remains in Town about 9000 Souls (besides the Servants of the Crown).”

AMBUSKE 

The sound of gun shots in the distance occasionally punctured that “Solemn dead silence.” Rebel colonists encircling Boston peppered British soldiers and sailors who drew too close to the mainland.

AMBUSKE 

To Admiral Samuel Graves, the commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy in North America, the British Americans who had fired on the king’s soldiers at Lexington and Concord had done so dishonorably in the “Indian manner of fighting, concealing themselves behind hedges, trees and skulking in the woods and houses whereby they galled the soldiers exceedingly.” 

AMBUSKE 

If Admiral Graves had had his way, his warships would have lobbed incendiary shells into Roxbury and Charlestown, where rebels were hiding and harassing his sailors, but Gage prevented him from giving that order. Instead, Graves deployed boats to ring the town and stop civilians from leaving. He believed that if women and children remained inside Boston, the king’s rebel subjects would be less likely to attack.

AMBUSKE 

With her husband, Paul, just across the river in Cambridge, Rachel Revere, her step-children, and her own five-month-old son were trapped in town, with provisions running low, and almost no news coming in or going out.

AMBUSKE 

In the days immediately after the skirmishes, she tried to get a letter to Paul, begging her husband that:

RACHEL REVERE 

“you will take the best care of yourself and not attempt coming in to this town again and if I have an opportunity of coming or sending out anything or any of the Children I shall do it."

AMBUSKE 

Rachel enclosed £125 in cash with the letter. She entrusted both to Dr. Benjamin Church, a friend, a member of the colony’s Provincial Congress, and unbeknownst to the Reveres, one of General Gage’s informants. The letter never made it to Paul. Dr. Church turned it over to Gage, and the money disappeared into someone else’s pocket.  

AMBUSKE 

While Rachel soothed her children and prepared for the worst, both Gage and the town’s leaders recognized that despite the recent horrible events, they need not lead to a full-scale war. Gage saw no immediate need to declare martial law, nor did he want to escalate matters by sending more soldiers out on expeditions, hoping that some conciliatory measures might lead to better things.

AMBUSKE 

On April 21st, three days after the battles, John Rowe recorded in his diary: 

JOHN ROWE 

“This afternoon Several Gentlemen met with the Selectmen to Consult on Our Situation & chose a Committee to draft a Memorial to General Gage.”

AMBUSKE 

The Committee asked that civilian inhabitants, most especially women and children, be allowed to leave town with their personal effects. Gage agreed, but on two conditions. The first, that male residents who remained inside Boston swear not to take up arms against the king’s soldiers should the rebels attack the town. The second, that inhabitants leaving town surrender their arms and ammunition to the army.

AMBUSKE 

Across the river in Cambridge, the Provincial Congress learned of the proposed deal and urged Boston’s Selectmen to accept it. As in other colonies, an extralegal Provincial Congress had all but seized the reins of government in Massachusetts Bay as British authority began collapsing in the colony months earlier.

AMBUSKE 

Now, it advised Boston’s Selectmen that Gage’s proposal was “just & reasonable, and as the Inhabitants are in Danger of suffering from the want of Provisions, which in this time of general Confusion cannot be conveyed into the Town: we are willing you should enter into and faithfully keep the Engagement.”

AMBUSKE 

But one did not simply walk out of Boston. Fleeing residents required passes issued by the army to exit the town, and they weren’t always easy to come by. Bostonians could bring only their personal effects with them, no merchandise from their stores or tools of their trade, and they could not return to their homes once they left. British officials permitted just thirty wagon drivers to enter the city each day, meaning that most evacuees could take only what they could carry with them. 

AMBUSKE 

In late April, Rachel Revere managed to get a letter to her husband, Paul, in Cambridge, telling him that she was making arrangements to leave town. While her own letter is now lost, Paul’s reply helps us to understand the difficult choices families faced as they confronted evacuation. As he wrote to Rachel:

PAUL REVERE 

“​​I am glad you have got yourself ready. If you find that you cannot easily get a pass for the Boat, I would have you get a pass for yourself and children and effects. Send the most valuable first. I mean that you should send Beds enough for yourself and Children, my chest, your trunk, with Books Cloaths &c to the ferry[.] tell the ferryman they are mine. I will provide a house here where to put them & will be here to receive them.” 

AMBUSKE 

Paul's mother and two of his sisters seemed intent on staying in town for now, and if so:

PAUL REVERE 

“I will supply them with all the cash & other things in my power but if they think to come away, I will do all in my power to provide for them.”

AMBUSKE 

 The hardest instruction he saved for his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Paul Jr.

PAUL REVERE 

“It is now in your power to be serviceable to me, your Mother and yourself. I beg you will keep yourself at home or where your Mother sends you. Dont you come away till I send you word.”

AMBUSKE 

 As the Reveres would not be able to return once they had left, Paul, Jr. was to stay behind with the house for the time being, along with all the objects the family could not carry or were not permitted to take with them.

AMBUSKE 

None of his father’s instructions would matter, however, if the family could not get a pass, and that was proving difficult not just for the Reveres, but for many Bostonians. 

AMBUSKE 

John Rowe applied for one on April 28th, without success, even though friends and acquaintances had already left. 

AMBUSKE 

To secure one for their family, Rachel and Paul resorted to bribery. By early May, Paul had applied to Captain Irving of the 47th Regiment for a pass to bring his family over water by ferry to Charlestown, without any luck. For Rachel, this was unpleasant business. As she wrote to Paul:

RACHEL REVERE 

“I cannot say I was please'd at hearing you aplyed to Capt Irvin for a pass as I shou'd rather confer 50 obligations on them then recive one from them"

AMBUSKE 

But knowing that Captain Irving or one of his men would open her letter and read it before sending it on, she included with it:

RACHEL REVERE 

"2 bottles beer [and] 1 wine for his servant"

AMBUSKE 

Surely, the men needed something to eat with all that delicious wine and beer. Rachel told Captain Irving that her husband had some veal and beef in Charlestown that he would be willing to send over to Boston if that would please them. To the officers, this was very “acceptable,” even more so as supplies of fresh beef were running low in town. A pass was soon made ready for “Mrs Rievere, Family & Effects.” By early May, Rachel and all of the children except Paul, Jr. were safely out of Boston.

AMBUSKE 

Departing Bostonians would eventually deposit more than 2,000 guns and nearly 1,000 bayonets at Faneuil Hall as they left town, in accordance with one of General Gage’s conditions to leave. 

AMBUSKE 

Watching the exodus, one merchant thought that nearly half of the town’s inhabitants had left by early May. Not all were as fortunate as the Reveres. For those lucky enough to get passes, John Andrews told a friend in London, the parents “carry bundles in one hand and a string of children in the other, wandering out of town…not knowing where they’ll go.” 

AMBUSKE 

But as some Bostonians were struggling to get out of town, other colonists were trying to get in. For colonists sympathetic to the crown or outspokenly loyal to the king, life had become more dangerous. 

AMBUSKE 

In Falmouth, Maine, a territory that was then a part of Massachusetts Bay, rebels arrested an Anglican priest named John Wiswall in early May on suspicion of undermining the resistance movement. Under interrogation, Wiswall avowed that “not the severest punishment, not the fear of death” would tempt him “to violate the oath of Allegiance & Supremacy to King George,” his sovereign and head of his church. Freed on parole, the Reverend Wiswall escaped to a British warship and made his way to Boston, arriving “without money & without Clothing.” His family was “at more than 100 miles distance from” him and they were surrounded by enemies “who bear the greatest malice to the Church of England.”

AMBUSKE 

Loyalists in Boston began arguing to General Gage that allowing the town’s residents to leave with their personal property was a mistake. The "pernicious tendency of such an indulgence” could have catastrophic results. What, they asked, was to stop the rebels from firing on the town once all their friends and family were out of Boston?

AMBUSKE 

Gage saw some sense in the argument. He already feared an attack, and with intelligence reports arriving daily that rebel colonists and extralegal congresses in other colonies were seizing supplies and sending militia to Massachusetts Bay, Gage reduced the number of passes made available to residents on any given day.

AMBUSKE 

Outside of Boston, some British Americans had little sympathy for the plight of Reverend Wiswall or other loyal subjects who were taking refuge in the town. From Mercy Otis Warren’s point of view, they were choosing the wrong side in the fight for British liberty. 

ROSEMARY ZAGARRI 

Mercy Otis was born in 1728, in Barnstable, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. She was one of numerous children. She was the eldest daughter. Her family was of rather typical Puritan stock. Her father was a farmer and merchant, but what made her different, even as a young girl, is that she was able to get a very sophisticated education. I'm Rosemary Zagarri, distinguished university professor and professor of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Mercy Otis, as a young girl, had exhibited a great deal of intellectual curiosity and spunk, her father allowed her to be tutored, educated, along with her very intelligent brother.

AMBUSKE 

Warren’s brother, the attorney James Otis, Jr., read ancient languages, and attended Harvard University, an education typical for a man of his social rank and standing, and he became a leading intellectual force in the early resistance movement against Parliament’s imperial reforms. As an eighteenth-century woman, Warren could not attend Harvard, but was fascinated by the classical world, and:

ZAGARRI 

She learned to write, and she proved to be a very elegant and eloquent and learned writer. Everyone knew that her life would unfold typically as a wife and mother, and indeed it did. She married and had five children, five boys lived in the area, and her life probably would have been a relatively typical one, except for the coming of the resistance against Great Britain. Beginning in the 1760s which was especially tumultuous in Massachusetts, and then the coming of the revolution, beginning in 1775 and 1776 she came to play a role in that conflict by her writings and gained some local fame.

AMBUSKE 

In the years before Lexington and Concord, the home of Warren and her husband James became a gathering place for local leaders planning Massachusetts Bay’s resistance to Parliament and to former governor Thomas Hutchinson.

ZAGARRI 

This group of political leaders surrounding Mercy Otis Warren, her husband James Warren, John Adams, and really asked her to take up her pen in the service of the cause of resistance. She began to write these political satires directed at Thomas Hutchinson and his cronies, but also picked up on this spirit that there may be a systematic attempt occurring emanating from Great Britain to deprive the colonies of their rights and privileges, to take away their rights to representative government, to take away their right to elect their own representatives, to make their own laws. A lot of political writings at this time were published anonymously or under a pseudonym, and that's what she did. At first, the larger public was not aware that this was from the pen of a woman, although this close circle of political leaders in Massachusetts certainly were her fame spread by this covert network of political leaders in Boston, in Plymouth, where she was living at that time, and so she was known for having a gift with the pen, for having a way to portray the cause of resistance in very compelling terms.

AMBUSKE 

That included poetry. In early 1774, Warren celebrated the Bostonians who had dumped tea in Boston Harbor by publishing an epic poem about Amphitrite, the wife of the sea god Poseidon, who “Resolv’d to set the No’thern World on Fire” by drowning the noxious tea leaves in the deep of the abyss.

ZAGARRI 

If you read some of these plays, are poetry. It's very flowery language. It has classical languages and allusions that are lost to us who did not study the classics, but people at the time were very moved by these. People at the time felt that they had a galvanizing effect on the population that helped raise the alarm about these increasing infringements on American rights and liberties by the British.

AMBUSKE 

Warren had only just published a new play when colonists living in the British American world she helped to create began laying siege to Boston. Entitled The Group, Warren’s latest production satirized the loyalists surrounding officials like Gage as “a swarm of court sycophants, hungry harpies, and unprincipled danglers, collected from the neighbouring villages.”  

AMBUSKE 

In Act II, the character “Brigadier General Hateall,” urged “General Sylla” to do what Gage had done on the night of April 18th: to send out a company of men to seize and destroy arms and ammunition. 

BRIGADIER GENERAL HATEALL 

“‘Tis now the time to try their daring tempers…I feign would push them to the last extreme. To draw their swords against their legal King, Then short’s the process to compleat destruction.”

AMBUSKE 

But Secretary Dupe – a loyal colonist – did not share Hateall’s confidence: 

SECRETARY DUPE 

“Be not so sanguine – the day is not our own, and much I fear it never will be won. Their discipline is equal to our own.”

AMBUSKE 

 In June 1775, Lt. Richard Williams of the Royal Welch Fusiliers disembarked in Mercy Otis Warren’s imagined town of dupes, sycophants, and scoundrels, and the very real town full of tense British soldiers, distressed Bostonians, frightened refugees, and dwindling supplies.

AMBUSKE 

Williams was twenty-five years old, a talented map maker, and a brilliant watercolorist when he stepped ashore in Boston on June 11, after a six-week voyage. Later that day, he described the entrance to the harbor as “very beautiful” with several small islands dotting the seascape. With an eye for perspective, and from the deck of his ship, he could see Castle William in the harbor, and beyond it, the town, the warships, and the different military encampments, a layered portrait of color, shapes, and contrasts that “enriched the Scene.” 

AMBUSKE 

But that charming moment soon gave way to a stark reality. As he confided in his journal:

RICHARD WILLIAMS 

“but what a country are we come to, Discord, & civil wars begun & peace & plenty turned out of doors.” 

AMBUSKE 

The fire compounded another pressing problem for British forces and civilians inside Boston: they were running out of food and fodder for both people and animals. Though it was an imperfect siege, with the British still in command of the harbor, able to receive supplies from the Atlantic, ships could take days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, to arrive. These problems would only persist in the years to come.  

AMBUSKE 

In the weeks before Williams’ arrival, life in Boston deteriorated quickly. 

AMBUSKE 

Henry Pelham, a surveyor and engraver, walked the streets of a town he now barely recognized. It had been Pelham who had first sketched the scene of the bloody Boston Massacre five years earlier, a depiction of bloodshed that Paul Revere managed to copy and quickly improve to publish his more famous print. 

AMBUSKE 

Pelham had described the massacre as “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power,” the result of Parliament’s overreach, but now he might say the same of the rebels besieging Boston. In mid-May, he found “inconceivable the distress and ruin this unnatural dispute has caused to this town and its inhabitants. Almost every shop and store is shut. No business of any kind is going on.”  

AMBUSKE 

Hours after writing his reflections, part of Boston burned. On the night of May 17th, a soldier in the 65th Regiment was delivering musket cartridges to the barracks on Treat’s Wharf. At about 8 pm, a small fire broke out. Whether it “was Occasioned by Accident or rather from Great Careless,” the merchant John Rowe did not know, but the fire quickly spread and burned long into the night.  

AMBUSKE 

Rowe rushed to remove his merchandise from his store before it burned, but fortunately for him, the fire never got to it. It did consume 33 other stores, though, and destroyed the clothing of 4 companies of the 47th Regiment as well as some weapons.  

ATKINSON

The British even though they have fought previous wars in North America in the Seven Years' War, and have projected power as far away as India and elsewhere in South Asia, really underestimate the difficulty of waging a protracted war against those 3000 miles of open ocean in the age of sail, in the Seven Years' War, they have had a sanctuary America when they're fighting the French in Canada, for example, And they've had allies Americans in fighting the French. They don't have that obviously, when the American Revolution begins. I'm Rick Atkinson. I'm an author and military historian. Expeditionary warfare, whether it's waged in North America in the 18th century or in Central Asia in the 21st Century, is among the most difficult of martial enterprises. So the British Army during the revolution, unable to gather food and forage from the American countryside without being ambushed, is almost entirely reliant on provisions shipped from Britain and Ireland. But for example, of 40 transport vessels that are dispatched across the Atlantic in the winter of 1775/1776 only eight of those 40 actually reach the king's forces in occupied Boston directly. The rest are blown by gales to the West Indies, or blown back to Britain or intercepted by rebel marauders of 550 Lincolnshire sheep that actually make it to Boston on those ships that breed was deemed the fittest to undergo the rigors of transAtlantic travel. Lincolnshire sheep, only 40 of those 550 sheep arrive alive. These kinds of difficulties plagued the British throughout the war, they're very diligent in trying to organize their logistical train, as we would call it today. Logistics is not a word known in the 18th century, but they face serious difficulty.

AMBUSKE 

In May 1775, rebelling British Americans made life more difficult for the king’s soldiers and loyal subjects inside Boston by targeting food supplies. Many of the picturesque islands in Boston Harbor that Lt. Richard Williams had spied from the deck of his ship were used to graze cattle herds and flocks of sheep, and grow hay and other fodder. 

AMBUSKE 

On May 27th, six hundred militiamen waded through Belle Isle Creek to Hog Island at low tide, and herded more than 400 sheep, cows, and horses back across the creek to Chelsa. They shot any animal that would not leave the island. That same day, 30 men crossed to Noodle Island and torched a barn filled with hay.

AMBUSKE 

Watching the smoke rising from Noodle Island, Admiral Graves had had enough. He was determined to give the rebels the thrashing that General Gage seemingly would not. That afternoon, Graves sent the new schooner, the Diana, commanded by his own nephew, to fire on the militiamen as they left the islands. As the ship approached a ferry landing, rebels and sailors traded shots. And then the wind died, all but trapping the ship as it tried to head back into deeper water. Longboats tried to tow the ship back to safety, but the oarsmen could not outrun the falling tide. The Diana began scraping the bottom. Rebel reinforcements fired on the ship with musket fire, and for the first time, a cannon, killing some of the king’s men. Lt. Graves and his sailors tried to save the ship, but in the dead of night they realized it was lost. They stripped the ship of its cannons and set it ablaze. At 3 am, the fire reached the powder magazine. The Diana exploded.  

AMBUSKE 

The next night, John Rowe discovered that rebels had killed 20 of his sheep and lambs in his pasture. On the following evening “the Country People” burned a house and several barns on Norton’s Island.  

AMBUSKE 

When Lt. Richard Williams arrived in Boston, then, the town, the islands, and the mainland were vastly different places than they had been on the night of April 18th. 

AMBUSKE 

On June 12th, one day after disembarking from his ship, Williams climbed to the top of Beacon Hill on the north side of town, where he had a panoramic view of Boston. He could see:

RICHARD WILLIAMS 

“all our Encampments, & those of the Enemy. From this hill you have a view of the town & country all round it. Boston is large & well built, tho’ not a regular laid out town… but before the present unhappy affairs, it was livly & flourishing”

AMBUSKE 

Some 15,000 people had once lived in Boston, but

RICHARD WILLIAMS

"now they are counted only 5,000 & now dayly decreasing, by many familys having leave to quit the town."

AMBUSKE 

 Looking northeast from Beacon Hill, Williams could see Charlestown across the Charles River

JOSEPH REED 

“this town also stands on a Peninsula & the Rebels have possession of it which greatly surprised me as it lays so near us, & might be so easily burnt; the trade of Boston must have been very extensive & of great consequence, the great number of store houses & wharfs, which are contiguous to them shows it plainly, if there was not other proofs, I can’t help looking on it as a ruined town, & I think I see the grass  growing in the street.”

AMBUSKE 

Three hundred miles to the south of Beacon Hill, a Second Continental Congress was coming to terms with managing a war. The new congress had already been scheduled to meet in Philadelphia in May 1775, to continue the first Congress’s work of resisting Parliament’s imperial reforms, while entreating King George III to intervene in the crisis. But, the violence of Lexington and Concord had altered history’s course. 

AMBUSKE 

Delegates from the 13 older mainland colonies convened in Philadelphia. Despite appeals by the first Continental Congress, Jamaica, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and East and West Florida did not send delegates to the second.

AMBUSKE 

On June 12th, just as Lt. Williams was ascending Beacon Hill, the Congress appointed July 20th as a day of fasting and prayer in the colonies, calling on British Americans to beg God’s forgiveness for their sins, to bring an end to “our present calamities,” and “to bless our rightful sovereign, King George the third, and [to] inspire him with wisdom to discern and pursue the true interest of all his subjects, that a speedy end may be put to the civil discord between Great Britain and the American colonies, without farther effusion of blood.”  

AMBUSKE 

Whether God would end the war was uncertain, and the delegates had no time to wait for an answer. The Congress immediately turned to the question of raising money, just one of its many concerns in this fluid moment. 

AMBUSKE 

The provincial force besieging Boston was another. In the days after Lexington and Concord, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts Bay authorized the creation of a provincial army composed of regiments raised in the colony, to be joined by regiments from Connecticut and New Hampshire.  

AMBUSKE 

In many ways, this provincial force was intended to bring order to the patchwork of militia units and ad hoc companies that had ringed Boston since April 19th, especially as that patchwork began to disintegrate in the weeks after the skirmishes. Farmers could no longer ignore their fields, not with the harvest approaching, while others decamped from boredom or homesickness.  

AMBUSKE 

But it was only a New England army. For years now, the king’s ministers had believed that New Englanders, and Bostonians in particular, were the source of most of the rebellious spirit in British America. Lt. Richard Williams even called Boston “the Capital of all the American colonies.” In Philadelphia, the delegates to Congress recognized that a disunited effort would come to no good ends. 

LINDSAY CHERVINSKY 

There was a sense among many British that the Bostonians were rabble rousers, and they were the troublemakers, and if you could just isolate them from the rest of the colonies, then these protests would die off. My name is Lindsay Chervinsky, I am the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. To their good sense, the Continental Congress, the Second Continental Congress, understood that they needed to provide some support for the troops gathered in New England, and it needed to not be a New England force. It needed to be a national force to at least defend colonial interests and to push back on these incursions, even if they were still going to try and pursue a peaceful settlement. One of their first acts in early June was to create what they called the United Forces of North America. It was not yet regularly referred to as the Continental Army, and to then appoint a commander.

AMBUSKE 

Congress voted to create this army on June 14th when it authorized the raising of six companies of riflemen in Pennsylvania, and two each in Maryland and Virginia. Once fitted out, they were to march to Boston immediately and join the besieging forces to create a united army. 

AMBUSKE 

Nine months earlier, the first Continental Congress had taken actions that some British Americans had decried as too much like those of a government wielding sovereign power. Now, the delegates to the second were embracing that idea. 

CHERVINSKY

And this moment is such an interesting one, because they hadn't yet declared that they were a nation. They hadn't yet declared that they were a sovereign power. They had no long term government. The Second Continental Congress was essentially a temporary alignment, and yet they were claiming the right to do what all nations claimed the right to do, which was to have a monopoly on force.

AMBUSKE 

Someone would have to lead this new Continental Army. In 1775, there were only a few likely candidates in the colonies with enough experience for the command and who were willing to fight their fellow subjects. Horatio Gates and Charles Lee were among the very few. Both were English-born former British officers who fought in North America and Europe during the Seven Years’ War. Both men became frustrated with their inability to rise through army ranks as quickly as they had hoped, sold their commissions, and bought plantations in Virginia.

AMBUSKE 

The retired Virginia militia colonel George Washington was another. Twenty-one years earlier, Washington’s inexperience leading men in the field and his indifference to Indigenous diplomacy had led to the killing of a French Canadian officer in Jumonville Glen near the Forks of the Ohio River, and the outbreak of a global war soon thereafter. In that crucible of war, Washington learned many hard lessons, not only about the costs of war and how to wage it, but also about his own sense of place in the empire.  

AMBUSKE 

Washington coveted a commission in the regular British army. For men of modest wealth like him, a commission was a pathway for social advancement, unlocking a world of potentially greater riches and political power in the empire. A commission could be purchased from an officer like Gates or Lee, but only at great financial cost, putting one out of Washington’s reach in the late 1750s. He believed, however, that his services in the early years of the war merited a commission, which could only be conferred by the British government. Unlike Gates and Lee, Washington never got one.

CHERVINSKY

In 1757 he wrote a letter to Robert Dingle me, who was in the Virginia colonial government, he expressed this displeasure that he and his forces had been fighting with incredible valor. They had been in all of these bloody battles, and yet they were not receiving the same sort of plaudits from royal officials, from the government. They were not receiving the same sort of rewards, and they were not seeing this sort of professional advancement that they would have seen had they been official British regulars. We start to see this realization in his letters, that he is, in the eyes of British officials, a second class citizen for someone like Washington who was intensely aware of his personal honor. Who is intensely aware of how people viewed him, the assertion that he was somehow less than he really took personally. He uses this phrase that I think is so important because we start to see his thinking, where he is recognizing this moment, and he says, We can't conceive that being Americans should deprive us of the benefits of British subjects, nor lessen our claim to preferment, and we are very certain that no body of regular troops ever before served three bloody campaigns without attracting royal notice.

AMBUSKE 

Washington retired from military service the next year. If he had gained an officer’s commission and worn the redcoat of a British regular, the course of Washington’s life would have been very different. Perhaps he might have been sent to command British regiments in the Ohio Country he knew so well, or fought in Major General James Wolfe’s army when it captured Quebec in September 1759. He might have sailed for Cuba to serve in the hellish and disease-ridden Caribbean campaigns in 1762, or been killed fighting for George III in Pontiac’s Uprising the following year. 

AMBUSKE 

But after resigning from his militia command in 1758, Washington set about expanding the size of his Mount Vernon plantation and the number of enslaved people who worked his lands, began transitioning his plantation enterprise away from tobacco cultivation and toward grain production, in keeping with the English gentry farmers he so admired, scouted for new lands in the Ohio Country, and by the late 1760s had become a prominent, if reserved, figure in Virginia politics.  

AMBUSKE 

Washington had been one of the architects of the Fairfax Resolves in 1774, which rejected Parliament’s claimed right to legislate for the colonies and called for a general continental congress to discuss the crisis. He had attended that first Congress as a delegate from Virginia, and was making ready to attend the second, when the rebellion began. 

CHERVINSKY

This is where I really wish that Washington would write down his feelings. Washington rarely wrote down what he was feeling at a particular moment or what he was thinking at a particular moment, and that is especially true in 1775 and I hypothesized for two reasons. One, a lot of the people that he would be writing to, he was actually seen regularly in person, and so they were likely having these conversations face to face, and therefore there's no written record. And two, I think he is starting to formulate ideas about what his next step is going to be, and he does not want to leave a paper trail about that thought process. Now we can get at a couple of thoughts. He had dinner on the night of May 2, 1775 with Horatio Gates. He came to Mount Vernon. He stayed the night. He dined with the Washingtons. I'm willing to bet big money. They were strategizing, and they were talking about the Battles of Lexington and Concord and what might come next.

AMBUSKE 

When Washington arrived in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, he believed that:

CHERVINSKY

It was very important to me clear that this was not just a Massachusetts problem, that this was a national problem.

AMBUSKE 

And though it would have run afoul of his own deeply held eighteenth-century ideas about honor and virtue to say so openly and publicly:

CHERVINSKY

I believe that he was quite determined that should there be a national force raised that he be given a position of high command. The way that he demonstrated that commitment was by showing up in military uniform, which he probably hadn't worn all that much in the last decade or so, since resigning his commission as the head of the Virginia militia and taking up a position in the House of Burgesses.

AMBUSKE 

Though Gates and Lee were more experienced officers, when Congress began considering who to appoint as commander-in-chief in mid-June 1775:

CHERVINSKY

People like Horatio Gates or Charles Lee were immediately ruled out because of their association within the British forces. They were, of course, considered for other officer positions, and of course, received them. There were a number of generals in New England who were already on the ground with troops, but because they were from New England, it wasn't going to have a unifying force. Artemis Ward was quite old. There was concern about whether or not he was actually going to live through the war and probably not provide the same sort of inspirational leadership. We don't actually see that many other names come up. And this is where John Adams, really, in a lot of ways, was kind of the stage manager of the revolution. He orchestrates the nomination of George Washington, and because it was coming from a Bostonian, was very difficult for anyone to argue with, and so Washington was unanimously selected.

AMBUSKE 

Congress approved the appointment on June 15th. The forty-three-year-old Washington accepted the commission, but declined a regular salary, lest anyone accuse him of self-interest or question his commitment to what he had begun to call “the cause.” He asked only that Congress cover his expenses. 

AMBUSKE 

The new commander-in-chief of an armed rebellion knew all too well the price of failure. The British government had executed Scottish Highlanders after the failed Jacobite Rebellion of the mid-1740s. Men under his command had died at the Forks of the Ohio River twenty-one years earlier; he had witnessed the death of Major General Edward Braddock, his commanding officer at the Battle of the Monongahela; and he knew that prominent officers had been recalled to Britain for failing to achieve victory in the early months of the Seven Years’ War.  

AMBUSKE 

Certainly, in the quiet moments between the toasts raised in his honor in Philadelphia taverns before he set out for Boston, General George Washington contemplated the choices that had led him to this moment.

CHERVINSKY

He was going up against the greatest empire in the world, and at the time, as they understood warfare, his chances for success were quite limited. He thought his chances were quite slim, and he understood that if he lost, he was going to be hung as a traitor. He was correctly fearful about the potential danger of the situation. But he also understood that being the commander of a standing army in a country that was deeply distrustful of standing armies and did not have a built in mechanism to support that army was setting him up for potential catastrophe, because if he did have to requisition supplies, if he did have to use military authority as a police force, if he did have to corral citizens In some way that was going to make him deeply unpopular. He also understood that there were factions within Congress. There were going to be factions within society who were out to get him. And so the politics of command were going to be nearly impossible.

AMBUSKE 

Back in Boston, General Thomas Gage, the man who had fought alongside General George Washington at the Battle of the Monongahela twenty years earlier, declared martial law.  

AMBUSKE 

To Gage, the rebel forces in the countryside now encircling the capital of the colony he still presumed to govern had abandoned peace and desecrated law. In his eyes he had been patient and conciliatory, but Bostonians had been forced from their homes, had been thrown out of work, and the havoc the rebels had wrought on food and fodder supplies on the islands in the harbor, the loss of the schooner Diana, to say nothing of the rebels who had fired on the king’s soldiers at Lexington and Concord, now demanded a firmer response. 

AMBUSKE 

Gage proclaimed martial law on June 12th. He tempered that proclamation by availing himself to “the last Effort within the Bounds of my Duty, to spare the Effusion of Blood” by offering His Majesty’s “most gracious Pardon to all Persons who shall forthwith lay down their Arms and return to the Duties of peaceable Subjects.”  

AMBUSKE 

Gage’s projection of strength softened by mercy was not without precedent. George II had done much the same during the Jacobite Rebellion in the mid-1740s and Governor William Tryon had offered pardons to North Carolinians who had joined the Regulator Uprising in the early 1770s.  

AMBUSKE 

But mercy had its limits. Gage exempted Samual Adams and John Hancock from possible pardons.  

AMBUSKE 

For Gage, the more pressing problem, however, was that he did not believe he had enough soldiers, ships, money, or supplies to break the siege and contain a wider rebellion. He warned London he would need 32,000 soldiers in North America, with 15,000 in Massachusetts Bay alone, to bring the rebels to heel. 

AMBUSKE 

Some British officers believed that Gage was acting too timidly, that one good major assault would shock the rebels into submission and return the colony to the king’s peace.  But Gage had an even more immediate concern than their overconfidence. Rick Atkinson explains:

ATKINSON 

There's high ground around Boston. There are a couple of places that are particular problems if you're on the low ground in Boston itself, one of them is Dorchester Heights. The other is Charlestown, which is right across the Charles River. There was a small town there. And then there are a couple of pieces of high ground. The British and the Americans recognize that controlling this high ground is important. If you place artillery on the high ground, you can range Boston and make life really miserable for those in Boston.

AMBUSKE 

Gage, who by now had been joined in Boston by Major Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne, drafted a plan to capture the two prominences on Charlestown – Bunker Hill and Breed's Hill – with the army set to move on June 18th. Unfortunately for Gage, word of the plan leaked and quickly made its way out of town to rebel lines. On Friday night, June 16th, three Massachusetts regiments marched to Charlestown with orders to secure Bunker Hill.

ATKINSON 

The Americans get there first, and particularly, there are orders sent out to seize the high ground on the Charlestown peninsula to prevent the British from doing it. And so in the middle of June, 1775 Americans, in the middle of the night, march down the narrow isthmus that connects the Charlestown peninsula to the mainland, and they begin digging, they're digging in the wrong place. There's two eminences near Charlestown. One is a Bunker Hill, which is the highest ground there. The other is breeds Hill, which is a lower Hill closer to Boston. For reasons that have never been adequately explained, those in charge choose breeds Hill to do their digging. The British hear these odd noises in the middle of the night, noises of picks and shovels. They wake up first thing in the morning and see that, in fact, there are Americans entrenched on breeds Hill, and it's determined that this will not stand. They can't allow this. It really does pose jeopardy to Royal Navy ships in the harbor. Jeopardizes British troops in Boston, and so the decision is made. Well, we're going to take it back.

AMBUSKE 

When dawn broke on the morning of June 17th, sailors and officers aboard Royal Navy warships in the harbor could see that the strange noises they had heard in the middle of the night had been rebel soldiers digging trenches and constructing fortified earthen walls on Breed’s Hill. Five of the warships in range opened fire on these hastily-constructed fortifications, sending cannon balls that sang like tea-kettles as they sped through the air. It was among the last things one rebel heard on Breed’s Hill before a cannon ball removed his head. 

AMBUSKE 

The sound of the cannon fire awoke Gage in Boston, who quickly convened a council of officers to develop a plan to drive the rebels out of Charlestown. Henry Clinton urged Gage to act decisively and proposed that William Howe cross from Boston to Charlestown to lead a frontal assault, while he led a smaller detachment of soldiers over to the Charlestown Neck to flank the rebels and cut off their retreat. 

AMBUSKE 

Gage rejected Clinton’s plan as too perilous, fearing that if they divided their forces, the rebels could overwhelm them both and cross over to Boston. He could not afford to risk losing the town. He ordered Howe to make a direct assault.  

AMBUSKE 

As thousands of colonists climbed rooftops and ascended hills to watch the unfolding battle, to watch the spectacle and the horror, General Howe, ten companies of soldiers, and other detachments began rowing across the river to Charlestown. 

AMBUSKE 

Perhaps for just a brief moment, Howe’s thoughts drifted with the current back to London to Westminster Abbey, to the monument that the colonists of Massachusetts Bay had erected in honor of his elder brother, Lord George Howe, who had died fighting for the empire in the Seven Years’ War. Now, William was going to fight them.

ATKINSON 

The battle begins in earnest. Midday. It's going to be fought for four hours. It seems like four years to the British are in the middle of it.

AMBUSKE 

Howe knew almost immediately upon landing in Charleston that a difficult day lay ahead. Even though he overestimated the number of rebels opposing him, he could clearly see they had entrenched positions behind earthen walls on Breed’s Hill, and were using the buildings in Charlestown itself for cover. Fences and thick grass would impede their march.

AMBUSKE 

Howe declared to his men that he would not order them to go “a step farther than where I go myself at your head,” and around 4 p.m. to the sound of drums and calls from officers to “push on!,” the Redcoats began their ascent.  

AMBUSKE 

Few rebels who watched the more than 2,000 British regulars approaching them, marching in a line stretched across the landscape backed by a brilliant blue sky, ever forgot what one called that “awful moment.”

AMBUSKE 

Nor did the civilians and soldiers in Boston forget the flames that soon appeared in the sky. On Howe’s order, Admiral Graves commanded his ships to send incendiary shells called “carcasses” into Charleston. Watching from the governor’s residence in Boston, John Burgoyne described “The church steeples, being made of timber, were great pyramids of fire, above the rest.” 

AMBUSKE 

While Charlestown burned, the rebels subjected Howe’s soldiers to a hellish fire. 

ATKINSON 

Initially, the Americans have some artillery there, but mostly it's guys with muskets in very crude entrenchments, and yet they've got the high ground. They're angry. They're fighting for their homes and for their homeland.

AMBUSKE 

Rebel officers like Colonel Prescott ordered their men to aim low for the Redcoats’ waist and hips, felling many regulars as they struggled over fences and through grass toward the rebel positions. Some Redcoats even used their own dead to build walls made of flesh to give them cover.  

AMBUSKE 

Major John Pitcairn was among the dead. Pitcairn had led the vanguard of British regulars to Lexington and Concord on the night of April 18th. Peter Salem, a formerly enslaved Black soldier from nearby Framingham, had fought in those skirmishes as well. As Howe’s regulars ascended Breed’s Hill, Salem shot Pitcairn in the face.  

AMBUSKE 

Howe regrouped his men and pushed forward once more, only to encounter another hail of gunfire. 

AMBUSKE 

But the rebels were running out of ammunition.  

AMBUSKE 

By 5 p.m., the Redcoats had begun a third assault, this time gaining ground as rebel fire waned. To conserve ammunition, rebel officers ordered their men to wait until the enemy was closer. As the Redcoats closed on the rebels, Dr. Joseph Warren was killed. Warren, who had sent Paul Revere and William Dawes out to warn colonists that the regulars were coming out, had only just been made a general by the colony’s Provincial Congress when he made his way to Breed’s Hill. He never left it. Despite his rank, Warren was fighting alongside provincial soldiers when a bullet pierced his left eye and blew out the back of his head.  

AMBUSKE 

When the Redcoats reached the rebel lines and fortifications, the fighting turned into a melee of bayonets and the butt of guns as the king’s subjects fought hand to hand with each other.  

AMBUSKE 

The rebels began to run. Provincial soldiers on nearby Bunker Hill gave the retreating men some covering fire, but they still faced the Royal Navy’s bombardment of the Charleston Neck, a bottleneck that claimed many more lives.

AMBUSKE 

General Clinton, who had crossed over the river and taken command of some men, began pursuing the rebels before Howe called him back, knowing that New Hampshire and Connecticut regiments waited on the other side. The day had been hard enough already, and snipers were picking off the pursuers. 

AMBUSKE 

By dusk, it was all over. The British had recaptured Breed’s Hill and driven the rebels from the high ground, but:

ATKINSON 

It's at a terrible cost to the British. A thousand British casualties, 256 British dead of all the British officers killed in eight years of war, one out of every eight dies in four hours at Bunker Hill. It's a terrible day for Britain. It's not a good day for the Americans either. They've also had substantial casualties. They have lost Charles Town. It's deliberately set a fire by the British. They fire artillery shells, carcasses, they're called. And before the end of the day, Charles Town is in ashes. It had been a thriving community, so it's a bad day for everybody, but it's particularly a bad day for the British because they recognize now that this is really going to be hard. This is going to be bloody. This is going to be much more difficult than anybody had anticipated when the war began.

AMBUSKE 

In May 1775, Guy Johnson fled from his home along the Mohawk River in northern New York and headed for Montreal.  

AMBUSKE 

Johnson was the nephew of Sir William Johnson, the late Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Northern District, who had worked for years to keep the Haudoenousenne – the Six Nations Iroquois – allied with the king. Guy Johnson had taken his uncle’s place as the king’s chief diplomat to Indigenous nations in this part of North America, and he had only recently learned that a party of New Englanders was coming to arrest him. 

AMBUSKE 

In Montreal, Johnson found Sir Guy Carleton, the governor of Quebec, a colony that so far had refused entreaties from the Continental Congress, then meeting in the rebelling province of Pennsylvania, to join with the other colonies in a glorious cause.  

AMBUSKE 

Johnson warned Carleton that he had received accounts that New Englanders would move against Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, and that “they considered Canada as an essential object.” 

AMBUSKE 

Carleton had already sent most of the British regulars under his command south to Boston to reinforce General Gage in 1774, leaving him with only Canadian militia to bolster what remained of his regular forces. Much would depend on keeping the Six Nations allied with the crown in the emerging British civil war, though Carleton was at first reluctant to send the warriors south.  

AMBUSKE 

Carleton would not have to worry about the rebels where they were. They were coming to him. Ten days after the British won a desperate and costly battle on Breed's Hill in Massachusetts Bay, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted to liberate Canada.  

AMBUSKE 

I’m your host, Jim Ambuske. 

AMBUSKE 

Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. 

AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

AMBUSKE 

Head to r2studios.org to find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading. ​

AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds is researched and written by me, and co-researched and co-written by Annabelle Spencer. Jeanette Patrick provided additional research, writing, and script editing.  

AMBUSKE 

Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent.  

AMBUSKE 

Our lead audio editor for this episode is Curt Dahl of cd squared.

AMBUSKE 

Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant.

AMBUSKE 

Special thanks to the Georgian Papers Programme and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.   

AMBUSKE 

Our thanks to Rick Atkinson, Lindsay Chervinsky, Brad Jones, and Rosemary Zagarri for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE 

Thanks also to our voice actors Adam Smith, Grace Mallon, John Turner, Annabelle Spencer, Evan McCormick, John Terry, Spencer McBride, and Peter Walker.  

AMBUSKE 

Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.