Editor’s Note: Raymond Arsenault is a professor of history emeritus at the University of South Florida and the author of the first full-length biography of the Civil Rights leader and Congressman, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, in which parts of this essay appeared. It was a New Yorker “Best Book of 2024” Selection.
Editor’s Note: Edward J. Larson is a professor at Pepperdine University and previously taught at the University of Georgia, Yale, and Stanford, among other universities. His many books include Summer for the Gods, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History, and most recently Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters, in which portions of this essay appeared.
In their relatively comfortable winter quarters in Boston, the British were largely ignorant of George Washington’s audacious plan to force them out of Boston. On the other hand, patriot leaders alerted by informants always seemed to know precisely what the British would do before they did it, such as the prior April when the British marched on Concord to try to capture the patriot armory, or two months later when the British took the highlands around Bunker Hill.