More in one night

What happened

By the winter of 1775 the siege of Boston had stalled. The Americans could not take the town without the heavy guns captured at Ticonderoga, and Colonel Henry Knox had dragged them three hundred miles over snow and ice on sledges, arriving in early February. Washington, eager for glory in the European manner, wanted to storm Boston across the ice, and his council of war said no for the fourth time. General Artemas Ward proposed to do something sensible: put the guns on Dorchester Heights, which looked down on the town and the harbor from the south and which the British had somehow left empty. The ground was frozen too hard to dig a redoubt, so Colonel Rufus Putnam proposed frames to stand on top of it. On the night of 4 March, while a cannonade from Cambridge and Roxbury drew the British eye, General John Thomas took two thousand men and 360 carts up the hill. Hay bales muffled the carts, barrels of stones stood ready to roll down on attackers, and by morning two forts stood on the crest. Howe woke to see them. He decided to leave, and on 17 March he sailed for Halifax with more than 170 ships and a thousand Tories. Boston, Rothbard writes, the spearhead of the Revolution, had at last been liberated.