Short and plump, somewhat fussy but well regarded in the king’s army, Clinton was one of three major generals who had arrived less than three weeks earlier to shore up General Gage’s command. Their orders had been signed long before Lexington, and the three—Clinton, William Howe and John Burgoyne—landed in America full of contempt for Gage’s performance. When General Burgoyne was told that there were about five thousand British soldiers stationed in Boston, he had made a joke that circulated widely among both the loyalists and the patriots. “What!” Burgoyne had jeered. “Ten thousand peasants keep five thousand king’s troops shut up? Well, let us get in, and we’ll soon find elbow room!” The logical place to make that room was on the three crucial hills around Boston—Dorchester Heights, Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, which looked down upon Charlestown’s peninsula. The Americans could entrench themselves there and then fire down on the ships in the harbor or on the town itself.
