Evacuation Day

Evacuation Day commemorates a battle that didn't happen, on March 17th, 1776, when the British forces pulled out of Boston under the guns of General George Washington. Celebrating a lack of bloodshed on a particular day of a war of rebellion seems a good enough reason to be happy, and the departure of General Howe's 9,000 redcoats meant the lifting of his 11-month siege and occupation of Boston. It was Washington's first real victory and was largely the result of stratagem and wit.

Washington had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June of 1775. Overmatched in military might, he soon came to realize that his only hope for a decisive edge was a classic military tactic: seizing the high ground, thus gaining the advantage by being able to train cannons on the enemy below.

Unfortunately, two problems stood in his way. He didn't have the cannons he needed to force the issue, and the piece of high ground he had in mind, Dorchester Heights in South Boston-with its commanding view of Boston Neck-could not be held against the British without cannons. If he tried to occupy the high ground prematurely, the British would bombard his ill-equipped troops off the hill and occupy it themselves.

The solution to the first problem, where to get artillery, came from a surprising direction. On January 24th, 1767, Henry Knox and his men seized Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, capturing its massive cannons. In an amazing feat, by horse, hand and ox, he hauled them across the frozen landscape of northern New England and delivered them to the Revolutionary forces in Cambridge.

The second problem, taking the Heights, now became a race against time. The British had their own eye on the hilltop but were waiting for reinforcements in order to occupy it. If they spotted Washington's much smaller force approaching and fortifying the spot, they would cut them down before they could get their cannon in place. Therefore, the Continentals sent a party of 30 to cut down birch trees for the construction of "fascines," crude wooden fortifications. On the night of March 4th, Washington summoned citizens of surrounding towns to help cart the fascines to Dorchester Heights, and 2,000 of his troops hauled the Ticonderoga guns. The train of armament and carts moved in near-silence, with everyone commanded not to speak above a whisper. In the meantime, the rebels fired light cannon at the British from Cambridge and Roxbury to draw the British forces' attention away from South Boston while the work of fortification proceeded.

The morning of March 5th brought a rude awakening to the English. Suddenly, surprisingly, their position in Boston was untenable. While occasional fire was traded, General Howe realized that the only course open to him was retreat. Upon assurances from Washington that the British could leave unmolested if they refrained from putting Boston to the torch, he made his decision, and on March 17th a fleet of more than 100 ships sailed out of the harbor carrying all of Howe's soldiers. It was an amazing, and much-needed, early victory for the revolutionaries.

Dorchester Heights became famous, and an 1857 Boston guidebook notes, "To reach South Boston from Boston we may take an omnibus, and be landed in a very short time at Dorchester Heights, which were occupied by Washington and his troops...by ten o'clock two forts were formed, one towards the city, and the other towards Castle Island. Preparations were made for an attack by the British, and for defense by the Americans; but the weather prevented the designs of the former, and they embarked for New York. Few visit Boston without a view of the spot that once bristled with bayonets, or the lines of the fortifications thrown up so speedily by the Continentals."

Over the ensuing years South Boston became thickly populated and crowded with dwellings, although the top of the Heights remained open as a park. In 1902 the Dorchester Heights Memorial tower was erected there, with a plaque reading, "As the final act of an eleven-month siege, the Continental Army occupied these heights and forced the evacuation of British troops from Boston on March 17, 1776-General George Washington's first victory in the American Revolution." But the population that was now packing into the neighborhood was Irish, and it had its own views on the significance of March 17th.

To them, it was St. Patrick's Day: a day to celebrate a patron saint of the Irish, a tradition that was centuries old. St. Patrick's Day was a focal point of the community that eventually overwhelmed the memory of a battle that hadn't quite happened. But a day like this wasn't sufficient reason to have an official holiday declared. And so, in 1941, reputedly at the behest of Boston's best-known Irish politician, James Michael Curley, Evacuation Day was declared a holiday in Suffolk County. There was no school that day, government employees received the day off-it was a perfect solution.

And so this little corner of the country remembers a long-ago military stratagem, a little. But when you think of March 17th, what day comes to your mind? It might please you to note that during George Washington's secretive nighttime taking of Dorchester Heights, the official password was "Boston," and the official countersign was..."St Patrick."

Article provided by Homesteader