Siege Of Boston Quotes

Once, during the Siege of Boston, when almost nothing was going right and General Schuyler had written from Albany to bemoan his troubles, Washington had replied that he understood but that “we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.” It was such resolve and an acceptance of mankind and circumstances as they were, not as he wished them to be, that continued to carry Washington through. “I will not however despair,” he now wrote to Governor William Livingston.

This is also the story of two British generals. The first, Thomas Gage, was saddled with the impossible task of implementing his government’s unnecessarily punitive response to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773.

Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley,

Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dunmore’s declaration did “more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies—than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”70 Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.

As the scandal spread and gained momentum, Cardinal Law found himself on the cover of Newsweek, and the Church in crisis became grist for the echo chamber of talk radio and all-news cable stations. The image of TV reporters doing live shots from outside klieg-lit churches and rectories became a staple of the eleven o’clock news. Confidentiality deals, designed to contain the Church’s scandal and maintain privacy for embarrassed victims, began to evaporate as those who had been attacked learned that the priests who had assaulted them had been put in positions where they could attack others too. There were stories about clergy sex abuse in virtually every state in the Union. The scandal reached Ireland, Mexico, Austria, France, Chile, Australia, and Poland, the homeland of the Pope. A poll done for the Washington Post, ABC News, and Beliefnet.com showed that a growing majority of Catholics were critical of the way their Church was handling the crisis. Seven in ten called it a major problem that demanded immediate attention. Hidden for so long, the financial price of the Church’s negligence was astonishing. At least two dioceses said they had been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy after being abandoned by their insurance companies. In the past twenty years, according to some estimates, the cost to pay legal settlements to those victimized by the clergy was as much as $1.3 billion. Now the meter was running faster. Hundreds of people with fresh charges of abuse began to contact lawyers. By April 2002, Cardinal Law was under siege and in seclusion in his mansion in Boston, where he was heckled by protesters, satirized by cartoonists, lampooned by late-night comics, and marginalized by a wide majority of his congregation that simply wanted him out. In mid-April, Law secretly flew to Rome, where he discussed resigning with the Pope.

Fear. He’d seen something similar a few years back in Boston, during the height of the Spanish Flu epidemic, when anyone could be infected and you were scared to shake a friendly hand for fear of the invisible contagion. Thousands had died in the space of a few months, and the deadly terror that had spread in the wake of the disease had isolated whole swathes of the population as people became too afraid to travel. A siege mentality had pervaded the city, with the very lowest of Boston’s inhabitants bearing the brunt of the deadly plague. By the end of the epidemic, God only knew how many had died. It had taken at least a year before the mood of the city returned to normal and people began to breathe the air like they were enjoying it, instead of fearing it might kill them. The deserted streets, the boarded up stores and the people crossing the street to avoid you: that was Boston at the height of the epidemic.  And that was how Arkham felt right now. Like a city that people wanted to abandon, but were too afraid or too poor to leave.

It was June 17, 1775, during the siege of Boston. Colonial forces, having locked the British into the city, learned that the redcoats planned to occupy several surrounding hills as a prelude to breaking the siege. Ahead of the British, a revolutionary garrison had been assembled on the Charlestown Peninsula, a strategic area that overlooked both Boston and its harbor and offered a vantage point for artillery fire on the city. Throughout the previous night the militiamen had labored to build a defensive fortification. In the morning, General William Howe led the attacking troops, which were repulsed twice by the hill’s defenders, who inflicted devastating losses on the British regulars. On their third assault, however, the seasoned British soldiers successfully broke through the colonists’ breastwork and overran the small fort and the assembled colonial volunteers. But theirs was a Pyrrhic victory, the king’s forces suffering more than 1,000 casualties of their force of 2,200.