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EDITORIAL
OP-ED; Gotta wear green on Evacuation Day
Thomas M. KEANE, Jr.

03/14/2003
Boston Herald
All Editions
029
(Copyright 2003)

Ahh, Evacuation Day!

Around town, everyone is sporting Evacuation Day shamrocks, bartenders are busy doctoring their beer Evacuation Day green, and South Boston is in the last, frantic stages of preparing for its mammoth Evacuation Day parade.

OK, maybe not. Evacuation Day, admits William Fowler of the Massachusetts Historical Society, is little known and little remembered, an event that "sounds like a medical procedure."

Indeed, cynics claim, the day is just a ruse, a cover for the Irish-American celebration of St. Patrick's Day.

And they're right. The rise of the holiday coincides neatly with the political rise of the Irish. As Boston College historian Thomas O'Connor notes, it wasn't until 1901 that "the city of Boston authorized a St. Patrick's Day parade in South Boston on March 17 under the guise of a public commemoration of the British evacuation of Boston in 1776."

In other words, 125 years after the event itself, Evacuation Day was around to serve as a convenient excuse.

It's a quirky holiday, confined to Suffolk County. City schools are closed and city workers have the day off. Everyone else ignores it.

But maybe Evacuation Day deserves to be rediscovered. The holiday itself is a ruse, but the events it commemorates are themselves built on deceit and trickery - and they tell us a lot about the farmers who ended up creating the United States.

It was early in 1776. America had yet to declare itself free of Britain; it would still be half a year before delegates would gather in Philadelphia to adopt the Declaration of Independence. Yet fighting had already begun. George Washington was camped out in Cambridge, trying to put together a decent army and wondering how to get the British out of Boston.

For by then, Boston was virtually a British garrison. The previous June, the British had taken Breed's Hill in Charlestown, a difficult and bloody victory that cost the lives of 226 of their soldiers. But control of the hill gave them control of the city. By 1776, nearly 10,000 British soldiers occupied Boston, almost equal to the number of civilians who remained.

Earlier, in May, Americans led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had captured Fort Ticonderoga, 200 miles away in upstate New York. Washington had then sent out a young military officer, Colonel Henry Knox, to fetch armaments from the fort. Knox and his men dragged 59 heavy cannons and other armaments on improvised sleds over the snow, arriving in Boston in January 1776.

The weapons gave Washington the idea for a plan, one that verged on genius.

On March 2, virtually any American soldier who had a gun began shooting into the city from the west. It was intended as a diversion. While the occupying troops were firing back, Washington under cover of darkness sent 2,000 men with Knox's cannons on a complicated route through Roxbury, Dorchester and South Boston. From there they hauled the cannons up to the hills of Dorchester Heights.

It was a two-day project. On March 4, as dawn broke, the British turned their eyes south and saw a vast array of cannons targeting their fleet of 150 ships.

Commanding British General William Howe was stunned. "The rebels have done more in one night than my whole army could do in months," he said. Although Washington had a small, ill-fed, and poorly trained force, Howe thought it would have taken at least 12,000 trained men to put the cannons in place. He now figured Washington's forces had to be vastly larger and better than he had previously believed.

Suddenly, he was very afraid.

Even better, Washington's deceptions were themselves premised on a hoax. For while the cannons looked fearsome, Washington reportedly didn't have any ammunition.

But Howe didn't know that. He worried the Americans were about to bombard his troops. Moreover, remembering the bloodbath at Breed's Hill, his soldiers refused to try to mount an attack on Dorchester Heights.

Seemingly outgunned, Howe reckoned he had no choice but to leave. After a few days delay (during which Howe threatened to burn down Boston unless Washington let his forces leave unharmed), the British on March 17 sailed out of Boston Harbor.

It's a great story, one that tells us a lot about the character of those early Americans - and perhaps, we might hope, about our character today. Outnumbered, they were never outsmarted. They were bold and clever, willing to take chances and work hard.

And they mixed all of that with just the right amount of deception.

But there's another aspect of Evacuation Day that has special meaning to Bostonians, particularly as one's thoughts turn to Opening Day and the bitter, annual clash with the Yankees.

Where did the 10,000 British soldiers end up?

New York - where they promptly set up camp and stayed for the next seven-and-a-half years.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.