s rumored that Gage was preparing an aggressive
movement from Boston, which might mean pillage and massacre in the
surrounding country, and it was decided to draw in closer to Boston to
give Gage a diversion and prove the mettle of the patriot army. So, on
the evening of June 16, 1775, there was a stir of preparation in the
American camp at Cambridge, and late at night the men fell in near
Harvard College.

Across the Charles River north from Boston, on a peninsula, lay the
village of Charlestown, and rising behind it was Breed's Hill, about
seventy-four feet high, extending northeastward to the higher elevation
of Bunker Hill. The peninsula could be reached from Cambridge only by a
narrow neck of land easily swept by British floating batteries lying off
the shore. In the dark the American force of twelve hundred men under
Colonel Prescott marched to this neck of land and then advanced half a
mile southward to Breed's Hill. Prescott was an old campaigner of the
Seven Years' War; he had six cannon, and his troops were commanded by
experienced officers. Israel Putnam was skillful in irregular frontier
fighting, and Nathanael Greene, destined to prove himself the best man
in the American army next to Washington himself, could furnish sage
military counsel derived from much thought and reading.

Thus it happened that on the morning of the 17th of June General Gage in
Boston awoke to a surprise. He had refused to believe that he was shut
up in Boston. It suited his convenience to stay there until a plan
of campaign should be evolved by his superiors in London, but he was
certain that when he liked he could, with his disciplined battalions,
brush away the besieging army. Now he saw the American force on Breed's
Hill throwing up a defiant and menacing redoubt and entrenchments. Gage
did not hesitate. The bold aggressors must be driven away at once. He
detailed for the enterprise William Howe, the officer destined soon
to be his successor in the command at Boston. Howe was a brave and
experienced soldier. He had been a friend of Wolfe and had led the party
of twenty-four men who had first climbed the cliff at Quebec on the
great day when Wolfe fell victorious. He was the younger brother of
that beloved Lord Howe who had fallen at Ticonderoga and to whose memory
Massachusetts had reared a monument in Westminster Abbey. Gage gave him
in all some twenty-five hundred men, and, at about two in the afternoon,
this force was landed a