George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 7, 4th edition.

[408] that in their opinion, Dorchester heights should be

Chap. XXXVIII.} 1775. June.

fortified; and they recommended unanimously to establish a post on Bunker Hill. Ward, who was bound to comply with the instructions of his superiors, proceeded to execute the advice.

The decision was so sudden, that no fit preparation could be made. The nearly total want of ammunition rendered the service desperately daring; in searching for an officer suited to such an enterprise, the choice fell on William Prescott, of Pepperell, colonel of a regiment from the northwest of Middlesex, who himself was solicitous to assume the perilous duty; and on the very next evening after the vote of

June 16.

the committee of safety, a night and day only in advance of the purpose of Gage, a brigade of one thousand men was placed under his command.

Soon after sunset, the party composed of three hundred of his own regiment, detachments from those of Frye and of Bridge, and two hundred men of Connecticut, under the gallant Thomas Knowlton, of Ashford, were ordered to parade on Cambridge common. They were a body of husbandmen, not in uniform, bearing for the most part no other arms than fowling pieces which had no bayonets, and carrying in horns and pouches their stinted supply of powder and bullets. Langdon, the president of Harvard college, who was one of the chaplains to the army, prayed with them fervently; then, as the late darkness of the midsummer evening closed in, they marched for Charlestown in the face of the proclamation, issued only four days before, by which all persons taken in arms against their sovereign, were threatened under martial law with death by the cord as rebels and traitors. Prescott