Ever Wonder Why Bostonians Today Celebrate an Evacuation Day? It Marks the End of the Siege of Boston and the End of an Era of British Authority

On this day in 1776, The Siege of Boston ended with the British Evacuation of Boston.  The siege lasted for 11 months starting on April 19, 1775 after the battles of Lexington and Concord.  The Colonial Militia had chased the British back to Boston from Concord where they remained defending the town until March 17, 1776.  During those 11 months, the one road in and out of Boston was closed off as well as the port of Boston.  This meant that there were little supplies coming into the town, and soldiers soon ran out of supplies and ended up having to tear apart fences and church pews, not to be malicious, but to provide themselves with basic needs such as firewood.  In addition to lack of supplies, the soldiers and Loyalists holed up in Boston faced an outbreak of small pox with no way out of the small and crowded town without the permission of the commander-in-chief in charge of the troops.

When General Gage was recalled from Boston in October of 1775, the position of commander-in-chief fell upon General Howe.  General Howe, before arriving in America, had been a member in Parliament and had promised his constituency he would never fight against the American colonists, for he viewed them as fellow and civilian Englishmen, but now he found himself in a position where he might have to do just that.

General Howe arrived in 1775 on a ship called the Cerberus and arrived just in time to view the less than adequate conditions that the British soldiers were living in.  As a result, Howe began to feel that Boston really wasn't the best strategic position and began writing to his superiors in the mother country, asking permission to move his troops somewhere more valuable such as Newport or New York.  His requests were not approved.

If General Howe needed an honorable excuse to evacuate Boston, he needed to wait no longer than March 4, 1776.  By March 4, fifty-nine cannons which had been recovered and brought from Fort Ticonderoga to the surrounding countryside of Boston had arrived in the camp of the newly formed Continental Army under General Washington.  The man who had undertaken the journey to retrieve them was Colonel Henry Knox, who before the war had been a bookkeeper in Boston.  General Washington now planned to use the cannon brought from Fort Ticonderoga to the advantage of the Continental Army surrounding the British in Boston.  Washington ordered the cannons be used to fortify Dorchester Heights in the hopes of drawing General Howe out into an attack on the Heights while Washington himself hoped to send men across the Charles River to attack Boston.  General Howe knew that by attacking Dorchester Heights, the British soldiers might suffer more casualties than they experienced during their pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill, on the other hand, Howe was also aware that the cannons on the heights could bombard the British soldiers within the city if left untouched and therefore planned for an attack.

On March 5 and 6 a storm came through the area and ruined any plans for any attack on either side.   Howe was now left with the decision of whether or not it was worth losing so many of his men's lives for a position that he did not even view as strategic.  Howe decided to then take the cannons on Dorchester Heights as an honorable excuse to evacuate his soldiers from Boston and on March 17, 1776 he and his soldiers, and the Loyalists of the town of Boston boarded ships to sail north to Nova Scotia, ending British Authority in Boston, and allowing the Patriots to reoccupy the town.

Mezzotint of General Sir William Howe. Thought to be American Revolution but uniform style suggests French and Indian War era with the Order of the Bath badge added later.

Portrait of a young George Washington at 40 years old in 1772. At the time of his appointment as commander in chief of the newly formed Continental Army, Washington was only 43, and would have been 44 at the time of the British evacuation of Boston.

Colonel (later General) Henry Knox.  Knox began as a bookkeeper in Boston but when Revolution broke out he joined the Continental Army, volunteering to retrieve fifty-nine cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in New York, several miles away, and to bring them back to Boston in an attempt to drive the British out of his hometown.

Map of the peninsula of Boston with Dorchester Heights circled in red off to the right.

Map of the peninsula of Boston in comparison to the location of Dorchester Heights, labeled right of Boston Neck.