The fighting at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill had come and gone, and life in the encircled Massachusetts capital was consumed by simple, daily worries about finding enough to eat and scraps of wood, and steeling oneself for brutal fighting that seemed certain to come.
“A lot of people really feared that that would be Boston’s end, that it would end in some fiery conflagration,” said Jonathan Lane, executive director of Revolution 250, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization.
Thousands of people had fled before shots rang out at Lexington Green, and many Loyalists flocked to the town for safety. But after the British sealed off the town completely, those who remained either pledged allegiance to King George III, were neutral, or sympathized with the rebels and had stayed to safeguard their property.
Among the latter was Paul Revere’s teenage son, who remained to protect the family’s North End home.
The siege was harrowing, hungry, and pocked with alternating spells of boredom and horror. Civilians were barred from entering or leaving through a fortified gate that stretched across narrow Boston Neck, near today’s South End intersection of Washington and East Brookline streets.
Looking at Boston today, those day-to-day trials are hard to imagine. But in Lane’s estimation, those days were the most challenging in Boston history.
“The town was in a shambles,” said Peter Drummey, chief historian at the Massachusetts Historical Society. “The poor soldiers were taking anything that wasn’t nailed down.”
The long siege did not end until the British army, startled by the sudden appearance of Continental Army cannon on Dorchester Heights, evacuated Boston in March 1776 and sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, with 1,000 refugee Loyalists.
Their exodus put a close to “the last time Boston was under direct attack in its history,” noted John L. Bell, an author and Revolutionary historian from Newton.
Before the town’s liberation, Lane said, “there was very little work and very little income and you couldn’t leave.” There also was hyperinflation that drove up the cost of everything and sporadic provisions that could arrive only by ship.
Privation extended to British troops, as well. In one possibly apocryphal story, an officer was said to have shot his horse to feed his soldiers and himself.
“They’re tearing down houses and fences and anything that will burn to feed the fire to keep the army warm,” Lane said.
Little evidence of the siege remains in modern Boston, where streets and lanes that cross-crossed the Colonial peninsula were buried long ago under pavement and development.
Remains of British fortifications have vanished from Boston Neck, for example. So, too, have the Continental Army’s lines near the Eliot Burying Ground close to Melnea Cass Boulevard in Roxbury.
One building that remains from the siege immediately holds the Union Oyster House, whose first floor had been a dry-goods business owned by Hopestill Capen, a Loyalist. Another vestige is the time-altered outline of some rebel earthworks in East Cambridge.
“It’s hard for us to see the siege in the urban landscape,” Lane said. Still, he added, “it’s one of few Revolutionary stories where communities like Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill, Brookline, Charlestown, Medford, Somerville, Cambridge are part of the story.”
Those communities are connected to the Continental Army rebels who had encircled Boston from Chelsea to today’s South Boston, trapping the British and their residents inside the town with only the sea as a lifeline.
For Bostonians inside that cordon, their town had taken on a beleaguered, bedraggled appearance. Grass had begun to grow in the streets, shops and warehouses had closed, and most of the town’s Congregational ministers had fled from an occupying force that disdained their religion and its puritanical underpinnings.
“That is what I admire most,” Lane said, “just the fortitude of these people to stand there day after day, not knowing how it will end, necessarily.”
The Reverend Andrew Eliot, one Congregational minister who remained, lamented the damage done to Boston and the large number of his friends and parishioners who had fled.
“Where these scenes will end, God only knows,” Eliot wrote shortly after the siege had begun. “But if I may venture to predict, they will terminate in a total separation of the colonies from the parent country.”
Another Bostonian who stayed, John Andrews, wrote his brother-in-law in Philadelphia that those who had left the town would “forfeit all the effects they leave behind.”
“Its hard to stay coop’d up here … more especially without one’s wife,” Andrews wrote. “But at the same time, [I] would not wish to have her here under the present disagreeable circumstances, though I find an absolute necessity to be here myself, as the soldiery think they have a license to plunder every one’s house and store.”
Andrews also lamented the Bostonian diet under siege.
“Was it not for a trifle of salt provisions that we have, ‘twould be impossible for us to live. Pork and beans one day, and beans and pork another, and fish when we can catch,” he wrote.
Peter Edes, 18, kept track of his 107 days of confinement in a Boston jail. The apprentice son of a Revolutionary printer in Boston, Edes had attracted attention for his rebel sympathies as he watched the British retreat from Concord and the costly assault at Bunker Hill.
On Aug. 15, 1775, he wrote from jail: “Close confin’d, the weather very hot. Died, Capt. Walker, a prisoner taken at Bunker’s Hill,” Edes said. “The place seems to be an emblem of Hell … The worst man-of-war is nothing to be compar’d with this diabolical place.”
During Edes’ time as a prisoner, only 11 of 29 Americans who had been wounded at Bunker Hill and confined near him would survive.
The importance and impact of the siege are not widely known, historians said.
“What would you do in this situation?” asked Bell, the Revolutionary author who writes the “Boston 1775″ blog. “We can still identify with people fighting for liberty and being driven from their homes.”
For Drummey, the Massachusetts Historical Society historian, the siege is an “inflection point” that “is obviously an important event, not only in Boston but for the Revolution.”
When General George Washington and the Continental Army entered Boston after the siege, Drummey said, their improbable victory had lifted hopes among sympathetic Americans and morale among the army.
“People immediately really thought it was possible that a civilian army could defeat a professional army,” Drummey said. “They thought, we have done this already. We are a going concern.”
Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at brian.macquarrie@globe.com.
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