James Thacher would become a distinguished citizen, physician, and historian of Plymouth after the Revolutionary War. But 250 years ago today, on March 2, 1776, he was as yet neither a physician nor a historian. He was a young Surgeon’s Mate in the Continental Army, standing in the cold earthworks at Roxbury, Massachusetts, watching Boston under siege.

Only days earlier, in late February, Thacher had been transferred from a hospital in Cambridge to Colonel Asa Whitcomb’s regiment on the Roxbury siege lines. Around him, something was clearly underway. Wagons moved along thawing roads. New militia regiments appeared in the Roxbury camp. Officers moved with unusual urgency. Thacher could sense that the army was preparing for something far larger than the routine stalemate that had defined the winter.

He did not yet know the full plan. General George Washington intended to send American troops across the narrow Dorchester Neck to seize and fortify Dorchester Heights. From those commanding hills, American artillery could threaten the British fleet and make Boston untenable. The plan depended on the recent arrival of heavy guns hauled 300 miles over snow and ice from Fort Ticonderoga, a monumental effort led by Colonel Henry Knox of Boston.

While generals planned and artillery crews readied for the daring move, Thacher prepared for the human cost. On February 22, he wrote:

Several regiments of militia have arrived from the country; and orders have been received for surgeons and mates to prepare lint and bandages, to the amount of two thousand, for fractured limbs, and other gun shot wounds. It is however to be hoped that not one quarter of the number will be required, whatever may be the nature of the occasion…Either a general assault on the town of Boston, or the erection of works on the heights of Dorchester, or both, is generally supposed to be in contemplation.[1]

Then, on March 2, the stillness broke. Washington ordered the newly emplaced guns to open fire from American positions stretching from Cambridge to Roxbury. The bombardment was meant to distract the British from the coming movement onto Dorchester Heights. Thacher recorded the moment, “A very heavy discharge of cannon and mortars commenced from all our works at Cambridge and Roxbury.”[2]

The thunder did not stop. Through March 3, the opposing armies hurled shot and shell across the muddy landscape. Thacher watched and waited, knowing that the surgeons’ bandages he had prepared might soon be needed. He wrote, “The firing from our works continues, but the great brass mortar, the Congress, and two others, have unfortunately burst; which is exceedingly regretted.”

He could not yet see how close they were to victory, or how profoundly these days would shape the future of Boston, and all of New England.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll follow Thacher’s journal and see where this young Surgeon’s Mate, standing in the cold lines at Roxbury on March 2, 1776, would find himself as one of the decisive moments of the American Revolution unfolded.

[1] James Thacher, A Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War, from 1775 to 1783 (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1823), 45.

[2] Thacher, 46.