The British Are Leaving
Mar 17, 2026
On the morning of March 5, 1776, the British occupiers of Boston awoke to see General George Washington’s guns—saved at the cost of immense toil from Ticonderoga—staring down at them across the “Neck” from Dorchester Heights. Now, after nearly a year of pricking and probing, feints and counter-feints, the Continentals could bombard the city and the harbor to devastating effect.
Governor-General William Howe, the British commander, had orders from the King not to let valuable property or places fall into enemy hands. Likewise, Washington had orders from the Continental Congress to take Boston even if it meant destroying it. Both generals had been itching for an engagement since at least July. The decisive moment had come. Would Boston, like so many besieged cities before and since, be consumed in flames?
Today, Dorchester Heights has been leveled, its land used to fill tidal flats and create South Boston—aka “Southie.” It is part of the city now, comprising a pleasant park with a monument dedicated in 1902. (The latter became, 50 years ago, the epicenter of South Boston’s protests against Massachusetts’ judiciary’s tyrannic system of busing.) The city center is less than an hour’s walk away, through rows of townhouses, past the gleaming towers of the Seaport, and under the scaffolding of the Central Artery. In 1776, the journey from downtown to the Heights would have required the British to traverse the water and embark from their ships on a hostile slope, in the face of enemy fire.
On the nights of March 2, 3, and 4, according to the diary of Selectman Timothy Newell, both sides kept up “a most terrible bombardment … as if heaven and earth were engaged.” Some houses were damaged, and there were extensive fires. But Newell adds that “[I] can’t learn any of the Inhabitants have been hurt, except a little boy of Mr. Leaks, had his leg broken.”
The bombardment was a ruse by the Continentals to divert the British from Washington’s successful fortification of the Heights. When Howe saw what had been done, he determined at last to attack. He prepared men and boats to sail against Dorchester, but then, as if by Providence, the weather intervened, and hail, snow, and wind blew the British back into the harbor. The storm repulsed a second attempt the next day. Washington was disappointed. He relished beating back the British on March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre.
By March 7, Howe realized that his position was untenable. He gave orders to begin evacuating the city. Because of the large number of people involved—11,000 British troops and over 1,000 Tories and their families—this was no small undertaking. It also put Boston in a delicate position. Howe ordered his men not to fire on the town, but added that they would if attacked by the townspeople or Washington. Despite these orders, Newell and other residents reported “Shops, stores, houses, plundered, vessels cut to pieces, etc., etc. Very distressed times.” Newell adds on March 13,
Soldiers and sailors plundering of houses, shops, warehouses—Sugar and salt etc. thrown into the River, which was greatly covered with hogsheads, barrels of flour, house furniture, carts trucks etc., etc.—One Person suffered four thousand pounds sterling, by his shipping being cut to pieces etc. Another five thousand pounds sterling, in salt wantonly thrown into the River.
By March 15, he reports that the British have blocked several streets with carts full of horse manure and “large limbs of trees from the Mall,” so afraid are they of pursuit by the Continentals.
Though Washington had no plans to chase the British down Boston’s streets, he was impatient for Howe to leave. On March 16, he took another hill, quite close to the city, to drive the point home. An informal attempt at negotiation by Boston’s patriot leaders—including Newell—did not result in direct communication between the generals, who refused to acknowledge each other, but it did likely help keep Washington from firing on the British and the British, in turn, from setting the city behind them on fire.
On March 17, at 4:00 a.m., Howe began embarking his troops and charges. Tory families took so many of their own possessions that the British had to leave many valuables in Boston for the patriots to recover. After fitting his ships for sea off Nantasket, Howe sent troops and loyalists to Halifax, Canada, while he moved south to secure New York.
The Continental Congress voted thanks to Washington on April 2, along with a gold medal and this expression of gratitude:
Those pages in the annals of America will record your title to a conspicuous place in the temple of fame, which shall inform posterity that under your directions an undisciplined band of husbandmen in the course of a few months became soldiers, and that the desolation meditated against the country by a brave army of veterans commanded by the most experienced generals, but employed by bad men in the worst of causes, was, by the fortitude of your troops, and the address of their officers, next to the kind interposition of Providence, confined for near a year within such narrow limits as scarcely to admit more room than was necessary for the encampments and fortifications they lately abandoned.
Washington did not tarry in Boston, however; he sped to the next scene of the war, New York, where he would face Howe again, this time with less success.
Boston was lucky. Some famous places, most notably the Old North Meeting House, were lost. But as nearby Charlestown revealed, an American assault, even if it succeeded, would have destroyed it. Perhaps Washington did not want to destroy an American city, especially one so famed. And perhaps Howe did not want to burn a city he hoped would return to the motherland’s embrace. The conflicting passions of civil war, which so often have reduced cities to rubble, conspired to save Boston’s past for the future. It was for later generations, under the guise of “urban revitalization,” to sack many places that Washington and Howe preserved.
But with similar twists of fate, later generations also remembered. The Irish political ascendancy in Boston had been underway for nearly sixty years when, in 1901, their leaders secured March 17 as “Evacuation Day,” a Boston holiday—as if anyone didn’t know the real holiday being celebrated was St. Patrick’s Day! (The Brahmin establishment replied the next year with the dedication of the Dorchester Monument by Governor Crane, Reverend Warren, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.) But at least the Hibernian conquerors retained the form—and thus some of the spirit—of their defeated foes. Today’s woke conquerors are not so gentle; they smash to pieces or melt down their enemies’ monuments.
Now, as ever, it falls to the teacher—and this is where higher education comes in, as the teacher of teachers—to tell the tale of the siege and evacuation of Boston. It is also the teacher’s responsibility to remind students of the moral of the story: those who wish only to hold will eventually fall to those who want to take.
In this moral lies a problem for American conservatives. Our founding was a Revolution. It was a taking, a conquest. The Prince was replaced, in this case, by a Republic. And, in good republican fashion, the taking was recast as a keeping, a saving, a preserving—of ancient lands and even more ancient rights—the most conservative thing ever. Or at least it would seem.
And what of Boston? It was the cradle of the Revolution, which is why the British sought to strangle the infant movement there. The liberation of Boston removed the theater of war to the river routes of Canada and New York. But Boston’s prominence in the Rebellion hadalready shifted south. Indeed, one could say that the lifting of the siege was one of the last shining moments of the “city on a hill.” Political power moved to Philadelphia, and eventually D.C. Economic centrality shifted to New York. When, nearly a century later, Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Massachusetts State House “the hub of the solar system,” his ironic boast echoed from the golden glow of the city’s long sunset.
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