11:26 AM EDT on Monday, June 5, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

From his camp atop Prospect Hill, Gen. Nathanael Greene had a good view of a bad scene. Below him was the acrid, fire-blackened town of Charlestown -- nothing but ashes, chimneys and the charred ribs of houses.

Above the ruined town rose the green fields of Bunker Hill. Greene could see with the naked eye the red coats of the British soldiers fortifying their works on that hill, not a mile from his camp.

Beyond Bunker Hill and Charlestown, he could see the blue waters of the Back Bay and the houses and streets of Boston.

Gen. George Washington had ordered Greene to take his regiments of the Army of the United Colonies to this post in July 1775; now in the darkening days of late September, Greene was pessimistic to the point of being depressed about the Army's prospects.

Journal graphic / Tom Murphy

The Siege of Boston: Over the winter of 1775-1776, Colonel Henry Knox carried 60 tons of Fort Ticonderoga's captured artillery 300 miles to the Continental Army surrounding Boston. By the following spring, Washington was able to force the British to evacuate the city.

On a day so cold his fingers stiffened around his pen, Greene wrote to a brother:

"If [divine] Providence should dispose of All here, You'l do justice to my Family I doubt not when I am no more. If there is no News favorable for America in three weeks you may expect to hear something terrible. Be silent on this Head as it may be a Disadvantage to the Attempt. Hundreds will perish and I among the Rest perhaps."

Whatever "attempt" Greene was worried about did not come to pass, but he had just cause to worry. Many of the troops, including most of his Rhode Islanders, had enlisted only into December; their terms would soon be up.

While the American forces were leaving, the British were growing more aggressive in their will to prosecute the war. In a speech that fall, King George III declared America in open rebellion and pledged to carry on with plans to send 20,000 new troops and naval forces to quash the rebellion. The king told parliament he had received "friendly offers of foreign assistance." What he didn't say was that the assistance came at a price.

German dukes had agreed to rent armies of their formidable soldiers at 7 pounds 4 shillings per man for the first group. Americans called these German mercenaries "Hessians," because more than half the soldiers came from Germany's Hesse region. When they crossed the King of Prussia's lands on their way to America, he taxed them at the same rate he charged for cattle going off to slaughter.

News that King George would send foreign mercenaries to fight his own British subjects incensed Greene:

George the Third's last speech has shut the door of hope for reconciliation between the Colonies and Great Britain, he wrote on Dec. 20, 1775, from his camp on Prospect Hill. . . . We are now driven to the necessity of making a declaration of independence.

Greene is apparently the first to write the phrase "a declaration of independence," a term that would be on the tongues of many the next summer.

Noble train of artillery

Early that winter, Greene's friend Henry Knox came to Washington with a preposterous scheme: he wanted to haul 60 tons of cannon from Lake Champlain to Boston, a distance of 300 miles.

American forces led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had captured the cannon while taking Fort Ticonderoga the previous spring.

Now Knox proposed hauling all of the fort's 60 pieces back to Boston, crossing over lakes, rivers and mountains. The cannon bolted to that fort were never meant to be hauled in the way of light artillery; even some of the mortars, including one called "Old Sow," weighed more than a ton.

To his credit, Washington didn't laugh the big, three-fingered, 25-year-old book dealer out of his headquarters. In fact, he promoted Knox to colonel and told him to give it a go.

First by boats, breaking through the skim of ice on Lake Champlain, then with 80 yoke of oxen pulling 42 sleds, Knox hauled the cannon. From Lake George he wrote to Washington that if it snowed, "I hope in sixteen or seventeen days to be able to present your Excellency a noble train of artillery."

A fortuitous Christmas Day blizzard gave him the snow he needed to sled the cannon up into the Berkshires. Coming down the mountains he braked the heavy sleds with tow rope.

While Knox was struggling through the snow on Dec. 31, 1775, Greene was writing from Prospect Hill:

[N]othing but confusion and disorder Reigns. Most enlistments expired that day, and men were leaving the Army, understaffed and low on powder, with a tenuous grasp of a tiger's tail. . . . I wish our Troops were better furnisht. The Enimy has a great Advantage over us.

We have suffered prodigiously for want of Wood. Many Regiments has been Obligd to Eat their Provision Raw for want of firing to Cook, and notwithstanding we have burnt up all the fences and cut down all the Trees for a mile round the Camp, our suffering has been inconceiveable.

A city decimated

For Greene the suffering got even worse: he contracted such a case of jaundice that, from the sound of his letters, he nearly died: I am as yellow as saffron, my appetite all gone, and my flesh too. I am so weak that I can scarcely walk across the room.

Greene grew so ill that his wife was sent for; though it was winter and she had just given birth to their first child -- a boy whom they named George Washington Greene -- she rode to camp to see her sick husband.

At Springfield, Knox swapped his plodding oxen for horses to pick up the pace; by late January he parked his noble train in Framingham, on the outskirts of Boston.

Knox didn't get all of the cannon in Fort Ticonderoga, but he got all that worked. By boat and sled, across ice and through mountains, with oxen and with horse, Knox had hauled some 60 pieces weighing 119,900 pounds. He also brought in 2,300 pounds of lead to make musket balls, and a barrel full of new flints for the fire locks.

Washington rewarded Knox by making him commander of artillery. Knox still had to figure out how to use the stuff, but at least now they had it, and none too soon.

In a single night, working under cover of heavy bombardment from Roxbury and Cobble Hill, Washington's army fortified the cannon on the highest point of Dorchester Neck. From a perch of 112 feet, Knox's heavy siege cannon could lob 24-pound balls smashing onto the British barracks below; with luck, they could also strike the British fleet lying at anchor in Boston Harbor two miles away.

The British made one faint-hearted attempt to storm the hill, but bad weather -- and memories of Bunker Hill still sapping the morale of the troops -- drove them back.

On March 17, the British fleet weighed anchor and left Boston Harbor, taking with them the British Army and thousands of Tory refugees who fled in justifiable fear of retaliation. The city they left behind had been decimated -- shelled, plundered, its trees chopped for firewood, its people starving and suffering an epidemic of small pox. Greene was immune to small pox because he'd had the foresight to be inoculated against the disease, a procedure that left a cloudy blemish in his right eye. Washington placed the sickened city under Greene's command.

In Greene 's last orders from the hills outside Boston, he ordered troops "to march immediately for Providence." The Army, and the war, were moving south to New York.

Just 12 months before, on the heels of fighting at Lexington and Concord, Greene had galloped toward Boston with borrowed money in his pocket and a rank of private in the Kentish Guards. Now on April 1, 1776, he led a spirited, triumphant brigade out of the freed city of Boston as an up-and-coming general in the Continental Army.

gcarbone@projo.com / (401) 277-7434

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources for today's installment:

Boatner III, Mark M. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1994.

Greene, George Washington. The Life of Nathanael Greene, Vol. I. Hurd and Houghton. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1871.

Henderson, Ernest F. A Short History of Germany, Vol. II. The MacMillian Company: New York, 1902.

McCullough, David. 1776. Simon & Schuster: New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: 2005.

Scheer, George F., and Rankin, Hugh F. Rebels & Redcoats. De Capo Press Inc.: copyright 1957 by the World Publishing Company.

Showman, Richard K., ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, Vol. I. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1976.

A continuing series.