The siege of Boston

The battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill were only the opening act of the American Revolution. That first act concluded with the forced evacuation of the British occupying force from Boston.

The initial clashes between the British Army and the colonial militias led to the British army pulling its troops back into and fortifying Boston. Looking at a map of Boston today it is difficult to understand why the British troops were able to keep the militia at bay. Boston, at the time, was on a peninsula connected to the mainland only by the "Boston Neck" a narrow strip of land holding only the road into the city. Any assault by the colonials would need to filter down this narrow road to get into the city. While the "neck" kept the militias out of Boston it also trapped the city and prevented resupply to the troops and the citizens.

As a side note, in 1857 a massive engineering project was begun to fill in the Back Bay to the north of the narrow strip of land, creating more usable land to the north of the "neck."

The militias had begun to move into the hills around Boston after the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 and they had remained and strengthened their positions. Still, they were not an organized Army until George Washington was appointed commander and arrived in Cambridge. Washington formed his staff and named Major General Henry Knox, a former book seller who learned about artillery from reading, as his chief of artillery. Knox suggested that artillery could force the British out.

So Washington sent Knox to northern New York to retrieve 59 cannons from the recently captured Fort Ticonderoga. Knox began moving the cannon 300 miles in December 1775 and arrived in the Boston area Jan. 25, 1776. A dozen cannons were positioned on Dorchester Heights overlooking the city. Soon powder for the cannon arrived and George Washington's Continental Army could begin shelling the city of Boston on March 2, 1776. The trapped British force evacuated their indefensible position in Boston by ships on March 17, 1776.

This week's column is a snippet of American revolutionary and military history and it recognizes March 2 as an important date in our history.

Jack Dragoni attended Boston College and served in the U.S. Army in Berlin and Vietnam. He lives in Chaffee, Missouri.