On March 17, 1776, George Washington stood on Dorchester Heights alongside fifty-nine captured cannon high above the city of Boston, Massachusetts, and watched as British troops peacefully evacuated the city after an eleven-month siege.
It was a remarkable moment for many reasons. The siege had begun in April 1775, in the days after the Revolution’s opening battles at Lexington and Concord, when local militias cut off the peninsular city from surrounding towns. A twenty-five-year-old Continental Army officer and former Boston bookseller named Henry Knox suggested that cannon might be used to drive the British from the town. Washington sent Knox to Crown Point and the recently captured Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York to retrieve fifty-nine cannon and mortars and bring them to Boston.
