History's Greatest Battles
Where the course of history has been decided on the battlefield. These are the battles that made us -- a detailed, entertaining, and tangent-free program about history's greatest battles. In this program, we journey through the constancy of human conflict, where the fates of nations and the course of global history have been decided on the battlefield. This podcast delves into our world-history's most significant and seminal battles, exploring not just the events themselves but their profound impact on the world timeline we live in today. Each episode is meticulously crafted by ardent and dedicated history fans with a passion for military history and an appreciation for the art of storytelling. Join us as we unravel the strategies, heroics, and consequences that have shaped civilizations and forged the destiny of entire continents.
History's Greatest Battles
The Siege of Boston, 1775 - 1776. America Refuses to be Ruled. Ragtag Militia Besieges and Takes Boston. America is Birthed.
By driving the British from Boston, the rebellion achieved its first decisive victory, expelling the bulk of British forces from the American colonies. This triumph was more than just a strategic success... it was a surge of confidence for the revolution. The war was no longer a scattered resistance but a tangible fight for self-determination. Emboldened by this victory, the Continental Congress moved forward with its most radical step yet. In the months that followed, the momentum gained on the battlefield translated into political action, culminating in the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
Boston. April 20, 1775 - March 17, 1776.
American Forces: ~ 17,000 Men.
British Forces: ~ 12,000 Soldiers.
Additional Reading and Episode Research:
- Lancaster, Bruce. The American Revolution.
- Peckham, Howard. The War for Independence: A Military History.
- Gruber, Ira. The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of History's Greatest Battles. Season 2, where we explore history's greatest sieges. If you know somebody that enjoys this genre of history, please share the podcast with them.
Under the icy grip of the harsh New England winter, British troops sat entrenched within the city, cut off from the land around them. Outside their fortifications, thousands of colonial militiamen, untrained and poorly equipped, held them under siege. It was the opening campaign of a war that had not yet been named, a war that had not yet fully begun, but a war that, by the time it was finished, would forge a new nation from blood and defiance.
For more than a century, the British colonies in North America had governed themselves with little interference. They farmed, they traded, they fought their own frontier wars. London viewed them as useful but distant, a source of raw materials, a market for goods, and, when necessary, a place to dispose of the unwanted. That arrangement held, until the empire demanded more. The war against France had left Britain buried in debt, and the colonies were made to pay for it. Taxes came first, then soldiers, then laws enforced from across an ocean. The Americans resisted. When protests were met with steel, rebellion became inevitable.
The siege was the first true contest of the war. On one side, the finest army in the world: well-trained, disciplined, commanded by officers who had fought on the battlefields of Europe. On the other, a force held together by little more than anger and belief. The British should have broken them. By every rule of warfare, they should have crushed the uprising before it had a chance to grow. That is not what happened.
The outcome of this siege shaped what came next. It influenced the strategy of the war, emboldened the cause of independence, and proved that a colonial army, if properly led and hardened by experience, could stand against British power. More than that, it sent a message, not just to Britain, but to the world. This was no riot. This was no minor insurrection. This was a war, and it would be fought to the end.
The echoes of this campaign did not fade with time. Its lessons defined the war that followed. Its consequences reached beyond the battlefield, shaping the nation that would rise from the conflict. In that winter, in those desperate months of waiting, fighting, and maneuvering, the course of history turned.
Welcome to History's Greatest Battles, Season Two, Episode 13: The Siege of Boston, from the 20th of April of 1775, to the 17th of March, 1776.
American Forces: roughly 17,000 men.
British Forces: between 11,000 and 12,000 soldiers.
By driving the British from Boston, the rebellion achieved its first decisive victory, expelling the bulk of British forces from the American colonies. This triumph was more than just a strategic success... it was a surge of confidence for the revolution. The war was no longer a scattered resistance but a tangible fight for self-determination. Emboldened by this victory, the Continental Congress moved forward with its most radical step yet. In the months that followed, the momentum gained on the battlefield translated into political action, culminating in the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
When English boots first sank into the marshy soil of Jamestown in 1607, London barely noticed. The Crown ruled in name, but in practice, it ignored its distant subjects. The colonies were left to fend for themselves, growing wild, unshackled, and independent.
By 1735, thirteen colonies dotted the Atlantic seaboard, and to the British elite, they were little more than a dumping ground for the unwanted, the debtors, the troublemakers, the lawless. What London failed to grasp was that these so-called undesirables were forging a world of their own, a world with its own rules, its own ambitions, and its own growing defiance.
For generations, the colonies thrived with minimal interference. They built their own economies, ran their own governments, and fought their own battles. But in 1754, everything changed.
A spark ignited in the wilderness near Fort Duquesne, colonial militia and French troops collided, gunpowder filled the air, and within moments, the first shots of a war that would engulf continents had been fired. What followed was not just a struggle for land but a full-scale battle for supremacy between empires. Britain and her allies on one side. France and hers on the other. The fight would rage across North America and Europe, shaping the destiny of nations.
The war had many names, The French and Indian War, The Great War for Empire, The Seven Years’ War, but its impact was singular. For the first time, the British and their colonies truly fought side by side.
At first, the British stumbled, outmaneuvered by the French and their native allies. But setbacks turned to advances, and by 1760, after brutal campaigns and relentless pressure, British troops, reinforced by hardened colonial fighters, seized control of Canada.
When the battlefields of Europe fell silent in 1763, the victors gathered to carve up the spoils. The Treaty of Paris sealed France’s fate in North America.
France was driven from Canada, its empire in North America shattered. Britain took possession of everything east of the Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes. The map had changed, but the consequences ran deeper than territory alone.
The war had proven something to London. The colonies were no longer a distant afterthought. They were valuable, too valuable to be left unchecked. And with British coffers drained by years of war, Parliament had found its solution. North America would pay its share.
The Crown’s new attention was unwelcome. The colonists had bled for Britain, and their reward was taxation and oversight. The resentment was immediate.
The English and their colonial kin shared blood and language, but that was where the similarities ended. A century and a half of separation had forged a people who thought differently, traded differently, and worshipped differently. The mother country had birthed them, but it no longer understood them.
Parliament’s laws, by British standards, were mild. But to men who had ruled themselves for generations, any law imposed without their say was an insult. They would not be governed like subjects.
As the 1760s dragged on, the grip of British law tightened. Each new act, each new tax, fueled the anger simmering in the colonies.
The colonists fought back the way they knew best, through commerce, through defiance, through sheer will. Boycotts strangled British goods. Blood stained the streets in Boston.
The final insult came in December 1773. Under cover of night, rebels stormed British ships and sent 45 tons of tea into the harbor. Parliament’s patience was gone.
The response was swift and brutal. The Coercive Acts crushed Massachusetts under British law. The colonists had another name for them: the Intolerable Acts.
September 1774. Philadelphia. The colonies came together, not as subjects, but as a people on the edge of war.
They launched another embargo, but this was different. This was a challenge, thrown like a gauntlet at the feet of the British Empire.
The Suffolk Resolutions were not mere protest. They were a declaration of defiance. If the British arrested their own, the colonists would strike back.
The message was unmistakable. If the British troops in Boston moved against them, the colonies would answer with force.
King George III had no patience for rebellion. He sent more troops, knowing full well that no empire survives by bowing to insurgents.
At dawn on April 19, 1775, British soldiers marched out of Boston with a singular mission, crush the rebellion before it could take root. Their target was Concord, sixteen miles away, where colonial arms lay stockpiled.
They met little resistance at first, brushing aside a small band of Minutemen at Lexington. But when they reached Concord, the weapons were gone. Worse, the countryside was awake, and it was furious. Hundreds of armed men rose from the land itself, shadowing the British column, striking, vanishing, striking again.
A relief force of 1,200 redcoats marched to rescue their comrades, but they only made themselves into a bigger target. By the time night fell, nearly 300 British soldiers lay dead or wounded, cut down by a people who had just declared, in blood, that they would not be ruled.
The response was immediate and overwhelming. Within days, 20,000 armed colonists had Boston under siege.
At the head of this gathering storm stood Major General Artemus Ward, a Massachusetts man who took command of the northern front while placing John Thomas in charge of the southern sector.
Reinforcements poured in from Connecticut, New Hampshire, and beyond. Even South Carolina, hundreds of miles away, sent men and money. The colonies were no longer scattered provinces, they were an army.
They lacked everything, organization, supplies, training. But they had something greater: the unshakable will to fight.
Inside Boston, General Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces, watched and waited. His 4,000 men sat idle, awaiting orders, awaiting reinforcements, awaiting a war that was already here.
London, detached from reality as always, saw no urgency. They sent a mere 1,700 reinforcements and three generals, William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne.
The colonists had men, but men alone wouldn’t win this fight. They needed artillery.
One man had an idea. Benedict Arnold, a Connecticut captain with fire in his veins, proposed a bold move: take Fort Ticonderoga.
He wasn’t the only one with the plan. In the wilds of Vermont, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys were already on the move.
At dawn on May 10, they struck. The fort’s garrison barely stirred before it was over. Not a single shot fired. The fort, and its artillery, belonged to the rebels.
A hundred guns. Cannons, howitzers, everything they needed to smash British lines. Now they only had to do the impossible, haul them through 150 miles of unforgiving terrain to Boston.
As the siege dragged on, the Continental Congress met again. They extended one last, meaningless hand of peace to Britain. Then they chose their leader. George Washington.
He was a veteran of frontier warfare, a wealthy planter, and, most importantly, a Virginian.
The northern colonies burned with fury. The South was slower to anger, still tied to the Crown. But Congress knew that if this fight was to be won, the South had to be brought into the fire.
Giving command to a Southerner was a gamble, one meant to draw the hesitant colonies into the war. In the end, it was a strategy that met only limited success.
Before Washington could take command, the fight escalated. Twelve hundred Connecticut troops, led by Israel Putnam and William Prescott, moved under cover of darkness and seized Breed’s Hill on the Charlestown peninsula, a position that put them in full view of the British in Boston.
Through the night, they labored, digging, fortifying, building a defense that would withstand the iron fury of British cannon. By morning, when the warship Lively opened fire, the earthworks held.
Gage had options, he could strike at the weak points in the colonial siege lines, cut off the rebels, and force a retreat. But he didn’t. Instead, he chose the bluntest weapon in his arsenal. He ordered William Howe to take 2,200 men and march straight into the teeth of the colonial defenses.
The British surged forward in disciplined ranks, red coats gleaming in the sun. The colonists, outnumbered and low on ammunition, held fast. They fired, reloaded, and fired again. When the smoke cleared, the Americans had withdrawn, but not before inflicting 1,100 casualties on Howe’s men. It was a British victory, but a hollow one.
The colonists suffered 400 dead, but they hadn’t been broken, they had simply run out of powder. Had they held more shot, the British might have been driven into the sea.
On July 2, Washington arrived. The siege of Boston was now his war.
The battle at Breed’s Hill, later misnamed Bunker Hill, had been a psychological triumph, but morale was slipping. The army was raw, undisciplined, held together more by passion than order.
Washington’s mission was clear: forge this disjointed militia into a real army. He wasted no time.
The weak would not be tolerated. Eight men who had shown cowardice at Breed’s Hill were court-martialed and found guilty.
Washington demanded the authority to hang deserters. He issued order after order, clean your camps, control your men, no more drunkenness, no more lawlessness. The army would be whipped into shape, or it would break. (Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels, p. 68).
Some bristled at the new discipline. They weren’t soldiers, they were free men, and no one would command them like an army. By the end of the year, many simply went home, tour of duty or not.
But those who stayed learned. They drilled, they hardened, they became an army. By the time the year ended, Washington commanded 17,000 men, not just in name, but in reality.
Across the lines, the British watched and did nothing. Gage hesitated. When Howe took over in October, he did the same. By November, 11,000 British soldiers sat in Boston, waiting while Washington’s army sharpened its edge.
Meanwhile, another war effort was underway. Henry Knox, once a bookseller in Boston, now an officer, was sent north to bring back the artillery from Ticonderoga.
Knox knew artillery, not from formal training, but from relentless study. He and his men hauled the heavy guns through ice, snow, and wilderness, backbreaking work that seemed impossible, but failure was never an option.
By December, the first cannons arrived, but the battlefield had already shifted. The British had pulled back from the heights they had fought so hard to take.
The redcoats huddled inside Boston, unchallenged. Outside the city, the high ground stood open, waiting for an army bold enough to take it.
Washington wasted no time. Through January and February, he positioned his new guns, expanding his grip on the city.
On the night of March 4, under the cover of darkness, Washington’s men hauled cannons up Dorchester Heights and fortified the position. When morning came, the British awoke to find death staring them in the face.
Howe considered an assault, he had to. But a sudden storm shattered his plans, wrecking his boats before the attack could begin. He abandoned the idea.
Surrounded, outgunned, and with no options left, Howe sent his terms: let the British leave, and Boston would remain intact.
On March 17, the British abandoned Boston. Soldiers, officers, and nearly 1,000 loyalists crowded onto ships and set sail for Halifax, their empire humiliated, their grip on New England shattered.
Boston should never have fallen. A well-supplied garrison, reinforced and properly led, could have held the city indefinitely. Washington’s army, underequipped and barely trained, would never have been able to take it by force.
The colonial army had numbers, but that was about it. They lacked experience, structure, and the logistical backbone of a professional force.
Washington had worked miracles, but in those early months, the entire revolution had been balanced on a knife’s edge. A single aggressive British attack could have scattered the colonial forces and crushed the rebellion before it ever became a war.
Gage had spent too long in the colonies, he had grown cautious, indecisive. Then came Howe, whose baptism by fire at Breed’s Hill left him rattled, hesitant, unwilling to risk another disaster.
Worse than their hesitation was their arrogance. Loyalist Bostonians had offered to fight, but British officers turned them away, refusing to arm men they saw as beneath them. It would be a mistake they would repeat again and again throughout the war.
In Boston, as across the colonies, Britain’s failure wasn’t just military, it was political. They could have found allies, but instead, through condescension and neglect, they created more rebels.
With the fall of Boston, the British had lost their largest foothold in the colonies. For the first time, the continent truly belonged to the revolution.
The victory ignited celebrations across the colonies. And the timing could not have been better.
Just months earlier, in January 1776, a fiery pamphlet had appeared in the hands of colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was not just an argument, it was a call to arms. It made the case for a republic, for an America free of kings, free of British rule.
The message struck deep. For generations, the colonies had chosen their own leaders, governed their own towns. Paine’s words simply gave shape to what many had already begun to believe. By year’s end, 100,000 copies had been sold, an astonishing number in a population of just 2.5 million.
In today’s terms, that would be the equivalent of selling 11 million copies, a book that was not just read but devoured, passed from hand to hand, whispered in taverns, preached from pulpits.
Paine’s argument, combined with Washington’s victory, changed everything. No longer was this just a fight for fair treatment under British rule. This was a fight for something greater, independence.
On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress cast the vote that would change history: they declared independence. Two days later, they put their reasons into words, the Declaration of Independence was born.
But words on paper didn’t win wars. The struggle had only begun. Seven more years of blood, sacrifice, and battle would pass before Britain would accept what had already been decided on that July day in Philadelphia.
At that moment, on July 4, 1776, the Revolution stood at the edge of a knife. The ink on the Declaration of Independence was barely dry when the storm broke. The British were coming back, and this time, they came with vengeance in their hearts. New York would burn. Armies would be shattered. Washington himself would be hunted, retreating across frozen rivers with the last tattered remnants of the cause clinging to hope alone. The darkest days were coming... days of hunger, days of loss, days when the dream of liberty flickered like a candle battered by the wind. But the American spirit did not break. It endured Valley Forge, where men wrapped bleeding feet in rags and prayed for morning. It marched through mud and ice, fighting not just an empire, but despair itself. It turned farmers into warriors, tradesmen into soldiers, and Washington into a legend. And in the end, it did what history said was impossible: it won.
Because America is not just a place. It is an idea, an idea that tyranny will not stand, that freedom is worth any price, and that no army, no empire, no king, will ever silence the roar of a people who refuse to be ruled.