The Siege That Humiliated Britain Before the War Even Started

[00:00:00]In 1775, the British Empire controlled the most powerful military force on the face of the earth. Their navy ruled every ocean.

[00:00:10]Their army had crushed rebellions on three continents, and their generals in Boston [music] were so confident in their own superiority that they referred to the colonial militia men surrounding the city as a mob, not an army. What nobody [music] knew at the time was that this so-called mob was about to trap 11,000 British soldiers on a tiny peninsula, starve them through a brutal winter, and ultimately force the entire garrison to pack up and flee across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia without a real fight. This is the story of the siege of Boston, and it started with a decision so reckless that it turned the entire colony of Massachusetts [music] into a war zone overnight.

[00:00:54]By the spring of 1775, Boston had already been a powder keg for years. British troops had been stationed in the city since 1768, and tensions between the red coats [music] and the colonists had only gotten worse. The Boston Massacre in 1770, the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

[00:01:15]Each incident drove the two sides further apart. The British Parliament responded with a series of punitive laws [music] the colonists called the intolerable acts which shut down the port of Boston and essentially placed the colony under military rule. General Thomas Gage, the British commanderin-chief in North America, [music] was also serving as the military governor of Massachusetts. He had thousands of troops at his disposal, a harbor full of warships, and the [music] full backing of King George III. On paper, his position looked unassailable.

[00:01:48][music] But Gage had a problem. The colonists had been stockpiling weapons [music] and ammunition in towns outside Boston, and London was pressuring him to do something about it. So on the night of April 18th, 1775, Gage sent around 700 British regulars marching out of Boston toward the town of Concord, roughly 20 m to the northwest. Their orders were simple.

[00:02:13]seized the colonial weapons cash and [music] returned to Boston. It was supposed to be a quick operation against an unorganized civilian population. It was supposed to be easy. It was anything but easy. By the time those British soldiers reached the town of Lexington at dawn on April 19th, colonial militia were already waiting for [music] them on the village green. Somebody fired a shot. Nobody knows who. And that single gunshot, the one that would [music] later be called the shot heard round the world, set off a chain of events that nobody in London or Boston could have predicted. The British pushed through Lexington and continued [music] on to Concord, where they found most of the weapons had already been moved. And then the real nightmare began. As the British column turned around and began marching back toward Boston, thousands of colonial militia men appeared along the road. They fired from behind stone walls, from tree lines, from farm houses and barns. Mile after mile, the shots kept coming. Fresh groups of militia kept arriving from surrounding towns, replacing the ones who had already emptied their powder. The disciplined British formations designed for open field European warfare had no answer for this kind of fighting. These were soldiers trained [music] to stand in neat rows and fire volleys at other soldiers standing in neat rows. Instead, they were being picked apart by men they could barely [music] see, shooting from cover and then disappearing before the red coats could form a response. By the time the bloodied and exhausted British column stumbled back into the safety of Boston, [music] they had taken nearly 300 casualties.

[00:03:49]Many of the soldiers who made it back were walking wounded. Their officers were shaken, and the colonists had just gotten started. Word of Lexington and Concord spread across New England like wildfire. Within days, militia companies from Massachusetts, Connecticut, [music] New Hampshire, and Rhode Island began flooding toward Boston. These were not professional soldiers. They were farmers, blacksmiths, shopkeepers, and tradesmen. They brought their own musketss, their own powder, and in many cases, their own food. And they came by the thousands. By the end of April, an estimated 15,000 colonial militia men had taken up positions in the hills and towns surrounding Boston, effectively sealing the British inside the city. And here is where the geography of Boston made everything worse for the British.

[00:04:40]In 1775, Boston was not the sprawling metropolis it is today. It was a small town confined almost entirely to a narrow peninsula that jutted out into the harbor. The only land connection between Boston and the mainland [music] was a thin strip of ground called Boston Neck, barely wide enough for a road. The colonists seized that neck and dug in.

[00:05:02]They placed cannons and guards on the approach and fortified the surrounding high ground. Overnight, the most powerful military force in the Western Hemisphere was bottled up on a spit of land roughly one mile wide, surrounded on three sides by water and blocked on the fourth by an army of angry farmers.

[00:05:21]The British still controlled the harbor thanks to the Royal Navy, and supply ships could technically reach the city by sea, but colonial privateeers began harassing those supply ships, sinking some, capturing others, and forcing others off course entirely. [music] Food grew scarce inside the city.

[00:05:39]Firewood became almost impossible to find. British soldiers started tearing apart abandoned buildings and even church pews just to have something to burn. and the civilian population trapped alongside [music] the garrison suffered right there with them.

[00:05:54]Starvation conditions, disease, and outbreaks of smallpox ripped through the crowded streets. One Boston resident wrote in a letter that the town had [music] become a garrison and that every face was gathering palenness. The British generals were furious. They had not come to America to be penned up like livestock by a colonial rabble. General [music] Gage along with three newly arrived generals, William How, Henry Clinton, and John Begoyne, began planning [music] a breakout. Their strategy was to seize the high ground surrounding Boston, starting with the hills on the Charles Town Peninsula to the north. If they could control those heights, they could stabilize their [music] position and eventually push the colonists back. The colonists learned about the plan, and they moved first. On the night of June 16th, 1775, roughly 1,200 colonial militia under Colonel William Prescott quietly marched onto the Charles Town Peninsula and began building fortifications on Breed's Hill, a rise that sat within direct cannon shot of the British positions across the harbor. By dawn on June 17th, the British woke up to find a freshly built earthen redout [music] staring down at them from the high ground. They had been outmaneuvered and they knew it.

[00:07:13]What happened next became one of the most famous and one of the most costly battles of the entire war. General How assembled roughly 3,000 British regulars, loaded them onto boats, and launched a frontal assault across the harbor straight up the slopes of Breeds Hill. The colonists held their fire until the [music] red coats were close.

[00:07:33]Some accounts say the order was, "Do not fire until you see the whites of their eyes." Whether or not those exact words were spoken, the effect was devastating.

[00:07:43]The first British charge was cut [music] to pieces by concentrated musket fire.

[00:07:48]The survivors fell back, regrouped, [music] and charged again. The second assault was ripped apart just like the first. [music] On the third charge, the colonists finally ran out of ammunition.

[00:07:59]The British overran the redout and the militia [music] retreated back across the Charles Town Peninsula. The Battle of Bunker Hill, as it came to be called, even though most of the fighting happened on Breeds Hill, was technically a British victory. They held the ground at the end of the day, but the cost was staggering. The British suffered over 1,050 casualties in roughly 2 hours of fighting, including more than 200 killed. Nearly a third of their entire attacking force was dead or [music] wounded. Among the dead were a disproportionate number of officers, the trained leaders that the army could [music] not easily replace. By comparison, the Americans lost roughly 450 men. General Gage wrote afterward that the loss they had sustained was greater than the army could bear.

[00:08:46]General Clinton, who had watched the carnage unfold, called it a dearbought [music] victory, and that assessment was right. A British officer wrote afterward that their three generals had expected to punish a mob rather than fight with troops that [music] would look them in the face. They had been wrong about that. Catastrophically wrong. Because after Bunker Hill, the British essentially gave up on offensive operations inside the siege. They had won the hill. But the price had been so high that the idea of [music] launching another frontal assault against entrenched colonial positions became something the generals could not stomach. Howal in particular was haunted by what he had seen that day. He had watched his men get [music] cut down in rows, watched officers he knew personally fall in the grass. That memory would follow him for the rest of the war and shape every major decision he made as a commander. The British settled in behind their fortifications inside Boston and [music] waited. And the Americans settled in behind theirs and waited, too. This is where the story could have stalled out into a permanent standoff. Two armies staring [music] at each other across a no man's land.

[00:09:56]Neither one strong enough to attack the other. And for months, that is exactly what happened. On July 3rd, 1775, a tall Virginia planter and veteran of the French and Indian War rode into the American camp at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and drew his sword.

[00:10:14]George Washington had been appointed commanderin-chief of the newly formed Continental [music] Army by the Continental Congress just two weeks earlier. The appointment [music] was partly military and partly political.

[00:10:27]Congress wanted a Virginia leading what had been a New England army to send a message that this was a fight for all 13 colonies, not just Massachusetts.

[00:10:36]Washington was appalled by what he found. The army surrounding Boston [music] was not really an army at all.

[00:10:42]It was a loose collection of militia units from different colonies, each with its [music] own leadership, its own standards, and its own ideas about discipline. Officers had been elected [music] by the men they commanded.

[00:10:54]Soldiers came and went as they pleased.

[00:10:57]There were no proper barracks, no [music] consistent uniforms, and dangerously low supplies of gunpowder and ammunition. Washington later described the force as undisiplined and inexperienced. His first general orders focused on the basics. He demanded an exact count of every man present for duty, every six [music] soldier, every barrel of powder, every blanket.

[00:11:20]Washington spent the rest of the summer and fall [music] trying to whip this collection of militias into something resembling a real fighting force. He introduced regular drills, standardized procedures, and insisted on discipline in the ranks. The numbers that came back from his first inventory were [music] grim. Powder supplies were so dangerously low that if the British had known the truth, they could have walked right out of Boston and ended the siege in an afternoon. Washington kept that secret from nearly everyone, including most of his own officers. It was slow, frustrating work. Many New England soldiers resisted taking orders from a Virginia planter they saw as an outsider. Officers who had been elected by their own men did not take kindly [music] to being told how to run their units. Enlistment terms were short, and men who had signed up for a few months kept leaving when their time was up, sometimes taking their musketss with them. Washington found himself in the absurd position of trying to build a new army while simultaneously using the old [music] one to maintain a siege against professional British troops just across the water. Meanwhile, the British situation inside Boston grew worse with each passing week. General Gage had been recalled to London in October, replaced by General William How. But the change in command did nothing to change the reality on the ground. The garrison was running low on food, fuel, [music] and patience. British soldiers tore apart warves and fences for firewood. They demolished old wooden buildings. They even burned the pews from churches to keep themselves warm. Rations were cut repeatedly, and what food did arrive by sea was often rotten by the time it reached the troops. Soldiers who had shipped out from England expecting to crush a rebellion in a matter of weeks were instead shivering through a brutal [music] New England winter. Stuck in a city that felt more like a prison than a posting, disease spread fast in the overcrowded [music] conditions, and smallox killed soldiers and civilians alike. The inhabitants of Boston, who had [music] not managed to flee before the siege closed in, were trapped right alongside the army, living under martial law, curfews, and [music] censored mail. Both sides knew that something had to give. Washington needed artillery. That was the missing piece.

[00:13:44]If he could get heavy cannons onto the high ground overlooking Boston Harbor, he could bombard the British [music] ships and make the city indefensible.

[00:13:52]The problem was that the Continental Army had almost no artillery [music] at all. A few battered field pieces left behind by retreating British patrols, nothing more. Certainly nothing capable of threatening warships or fortified positions. But 300 m to the northwest at a captured [music] British fort on the shores of Lake Champlain sat 59 cannons, mortars, and howitzers that nobody was using. Fort Ticonderoga [music] had been taken from the British back in May of 1775 [music] by Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain boys. The weapons were just sitting there. All somebody had to do was bring them to Boston.

[00:14:33]Enter Henry Knox. And this is the part of the story that sounds like it was invented for a movie, except [music] every word of it actually happened.

[00:14:43]Henry Knox was 25 years old. Before the war, he had been a book seller in Boston. His shop was a well-known gathering spot that counted John Adams among its regular customers. Nox had no formal military training. What he did have was [music] an obsessive interest in military science, cultivated from years of reading every book on artillery and fortification he could get his [music] hands on in his own store. After Lexington and Concord, Knox and his wife had snuck out of Boston in disguise to join the patriot cause. Washington liked Knox [music] immediately. The young man was energetic, confident, and relentlessly optimistic. When Knox proposed [music] a plan to travel to Fort Ticonderoga and bring the captured cannon back to [music] Boston, Washington agreed and gave him the mission. Most of Washington's advisers [music] thought the plan was borderline insane. The guns would have to be dismantled, loaded onto boats, floated down Lake George before it froze solid, and then hauled overland by [music] oxdrawn sleds and wagons across 300 m of frozen rivers, mountain passes, [music] and wilderness roads in the dead of winter. Some of the individual cannons were 11 ft long and weighed over 5,000 lbs. Nox left for Tyonderoga on November 16th, 1775.

[00:16:04]He reached the fort in early December and spent 5 days selecting and organizing the weapons. He chose 59 pieces in total, cannons ranging from 4 pounders [music] to massive 24 pounders along with mortars, howitzers, [music] barrels of gun flints, and lead for ammunition. He estimated the total weight at about 119,000 lb, roughly 60 tons of iron, brass, and lead that somehow had to move 300 m through the worst weather the Northeast could throw at him. The journey that followed became known as the noble train of artillery, and it was one of the most grueling [music] logistical operations of the entire war. Nox and his men loaded the guns onto flatbottomed boats and floated them down Lake George, racing against the freeze before the great 30-m long lake turned to solid [music] ice. Then came the real test. They transferred everything onto [music] oxdrawn sleds and wagons and began the overland march south through New York and east into Massachusetts. Picture what this looked like. Dozens of sleds, each one hauled by teams of [music] oxen, stretched out across a frozen landscape in a line that went on for nearly a quarter of a mile.

[00:17:17]The largest cannons weighed over 5,000 lb each. The roads, where roads existed at all, were little more than rutted trails buried under feet of snow. They crossed frozen rivers where the ice cracked and groaned under the weight of the heavy guns. At one river crossing, a cannon broke through the ice entirely and sank into the freezing water below.

[00:17:39]Nox's men had to haul it back out by hand. They dragged the sleds up and over the Berkshire mountains in blizzards and bitter cold. Oxen collapsed from exhaustion and had to be replaced with fresh teams from nearby farms. Nox himself nearly froze to death, walking through 3 ft of snow in a raging storm.

[00:17:59]In a letter to Washington, he wrote that it was not easy to conceive the difficulties they had endured. Towns along the route supplied men, oxen, and provisions. Local communities turned out to help push and pull the sleds through the worst stretches. The journey Knox had predicted would take 16 or 17 days ended [music] up taking nearly twice that long. But on January 25th, 1776, Henry Knox and his noble train of artillery rolled into the Continental [music] Army camp outside Boston. Every single cannon had made it. Not one piece was lost. Now Washington had his guns, and he knew exactly where to put them.

[00:18:40]Dorchester Heights was an elevated ridge just south of Boston, overlooking both the city and the harbor. The British had recognized its strategic importance early in the siege. General Gage had considered fortifying it months earlier.

[00:18:56]So had after him. Neither one had actually done it, a decision that was about to cost them everything. On the night of March 4th, 1776, Washington put his plan into motion.

[00:19:09]Under the cover of darkness, General John Thomas led roughly 2500 to 3,000 Continental soldiers up the slopes of Dorchester Heights. The troops had prepared for days, building prefabricated fortifications that could be assembled quickly on site. To cover the noise of the operation, American batteries elsewhere along the siege lines opened a bombardment of the British positions, firing cannon through the night to mask the sound of wagons, tools, and thousands of boots [music] moving up the hill. The soldiers even wrapped their wagon wheels in straw to muffle the sound. By dawn on March 5th, the British looked up at Dorchester Heights and could not believe what they were seeing. A massive [music] fortified position had appeared overnight.

[00:19:54]bristling with the very cannons that Henry Knox [music] had dragged 300 m through the snow. The guns were now pointed directly at the British fleet in Boston Harbor and at the city itself.

[00:20:05]One British officer, stunned by the speed and scale of the work, said it had been accomplished with an expedition equal to that of the geni [music] belonging to Aladdin's wonderful lamp.

[00:20:16]General How reportedly said [music] that these fellows had done more work in one night than he could have made his army do in 3 months. The British tried to respond immediately. Their artillery batteries across the harbor opened fire on the heights, launching a 2-hour bombardment that shook windows across the city, but it was useless. The American positions were too high for the British guns to reach. The cannonballs arked upward, [music] lost momentum, and fell short of the fortifications, burying themselves harmlessly in the frozen ground below. The colonists barely had to duck. Admiral Schulam, the commander of the British fleet in the harbor, sent an urgent message to Howal, warning that the fleet would be shot to pieces if those fortifications remained in place. How had to act. He could either launch an assault on Dorchester Heights or evacuate Boston entirely. For a few hours, how [music] seriously considered an assault. He ordered roughly 2,400 troops to prepare for an amphibious attack on the heights. A plan [music] that would have required his soldiers to cross open water in small boats and then charge uphill into fortified positions defended by heavy artillery. Every officer in the room [music] knew what that meant. The memory of Bunker Hill hung over the entire British command like a shadow they could not shake. They all remembered what had happened the last time they marched uphill into colonial guns. Over a thousand casualties in 2 hours, officers dropping in the grass. Entire companies shredded before they could close the distance. And the positions at Dorchester Heights were far stronger than what the colonists had thrown together on Breeds Hill 9 months earlier. Howal had learned the cost of underestimating colonial fortifications the hard way and he was not eager to pay that price again. Then the weather made the decision for him. A sudden and violent storm struck Boston on the night of March 5th, making any amphibious [music] assault impossible.

[00:22:21]By the time the storm cleared, Washington had reinforced [music] the heights even further. The window for an attack was gone. On March 7th, General How made his decision. The British would evacuate Boston. There would be no final assault, no last stand, no glorious battle. The most powerful military in the world was going to pack up and leave [music] because a 25-year-old book seller had dragged cannon across the frozen wilderness, and a Virginia planter had put them on a hill in the middle of the night. The evacuation took 10 days, and it was chaotic from start to finish. British soldiers barricaded streets, [music] sank heavy mortars in the harbor to keep them out of colonial hands, and destroyed anything they could not carry with them. They killed horses that could not fit on the transport ships rather than leave them behind for the Americans to use. Some soldiers openly looted shops and homes along the waterfront, helping themselves to whatever they wanted before leaving. One Boston merchant wrote bitterly [music] that they stole many things and plundered his store. Loyalist civilians who had supported the British cause for years scrambled desperately to [music] find passage on the departing ships.

[00:23:34]Many of them abandoned homes, businesses, and everything they owned, terrified of what the patriots would do to them once the army was gone. The scenes along the warves were frantic.

[00:23:45]Families dragging trunks and bundles through the streets, trying to squeeze onto ships that were already overcrowded with soldiers. On March 17th, 1776, the British fleet sailed out of Boston Harbor. More than 170 ships [music] carried approximately 11,000 soldiers and over a thousand loyalist civilians toward Halifax, [music] Nova Scotia. They left behind a city that had been under military occupation for years and a [music] colonial population that had endured smallpox, starvation, and the constant threat of violence. The Continental Army marched into Boston the same day. Massachusetts became the first American colony to be completely free of British military control. The siege was over. It had lasted 11 months from the first shots at Lexington and Concord to the last British [music] sails disappearing over the horizon. And it had been won not by a grand decisive battle, but by persistence, geography, and one of the [music] most unlikely military operations of the 18th century. The siege of Boston did not end the war. Far from it. The fighting would continue for another seven years across battlefields stretching from New York to South Carolina to the final showdown at [music] Yorktown in 1781.

[00:25:03]The British would win many of those battles. They would burn towns, occupy cities, and push Washington's army to the brink of destruction [music] more than once. But the siege proved something that mattered enormously in those early months of the revolution.

[00:25:18]Something that could not be unproved no matter what happened afterward. It proved that ordinary colonists, farmers, and shopkeepers, and a 25-year-old book seller [music] who had never fired a cannon in his life could stand up to the professional British military and win.

[00:25:34]It proved that the rebellion was not a riot that would burn itself out in a few weeks. It proved that George Washington could take a disorganized collection of militia and turn it into a force capable of strategic thinking and disciplined execution. And it proved to the rest of the world, to France, to Spain, to every nation watching from across the Atlantic that this [music] fight was real and that the colonists might actually have a chance. If this story caught you off guard, hit subscribe and [music] drop a like so more people find this video. And let me know in the comments which moment from the siege you think deserves its own deep dive.