In the middle of October, the burning of Falmouth, the modern Portland, in Maine, seemed to make it clear that the war was to be conducted ruthlessly on the British part. Captain Mowatt, with a small fleet, had entered the harbor and set the town on fire, and to those who communicated with him it was said that he announced his doings to be but the beginning of a course of such outrages. When the news reached Washington, he dispatched Sullivan to Portsmouth, with orders to resist as far as he could any similar demonstration there.[437] What a modern British historian[438] has called a "wanton and cruel deed" seems to have been but the hasty misjudgment of an inferior officer, without orders to warrant the act, and the ministry promptly disowned the responsibility.[439] During October, also, a committee of Congress,[440] visiting Washington's camp, could see for themselves the troubles of their heroic commander. They had not yet heard in Philadelphia the roar of hostile guns,—a sensation they might now experience. They could share Washington's perplexities as the new enlistments halted upon the expiration of the old,[441] and perhaps join in some of his kindly merriment when Phillis Wheatley, the negress, addressed his Excellency in no very bad verses.[442]
[Illustration: FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, No. 1. (_Looking towards Dorchester Heights._)]
[NOTE.—This and the three companion sketches are drawn from a panoramic view in colors, now in the Cabinet of the Mass. Hist. Soc., of which a much reduced heliotype is given in the _Mem. Hist. Boston_, iii. 80. This view is a copy by Lieutenant Woodd of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, from the original by Lieutenant Williams, of the same regiment, which is preserved in the King's Library (Brit. Museum). Cf. _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, iv. 397, 424; _Mem. Hist. Boston_, iii. 80.
The foreground on the left is the summit of Beacon Hill, not far from the spot where the State House now stands, though at a level considerably higher than the present one. Two of the guns now standing on Cambridge Common were taken from the dock in Boston after the British evacuated it, and they resemble the cannon here sketched, and one of them may possibly be that identical gun. The spire at the left would seem to be that of the First Church, which stood on the present Washington Street nearly opposite the head of State Street. (Cf. view of it in _Memorial History of Boston_, ii. 219.) The spire next to the right must have been that of the Old South Church. That on the extreme right would seem to be the steeple of the New South (Church Green) in Summer Street, now disappeared.]