On the twelfth of June, General Gage issued a proclamation declaring all those in arms to be rebels and traitors, but offering pardon to all who would lay down their weapons and obey the British governor. Two, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, were excepted. Their patriotism had been too intense and outspoken to be forgiven. [Illustration: WASHINGTON TAKING COMMAND OF THE PATRIOT ARMY.] The American army, now nearly twenty thousand strong, formed a line of encampments in a great semicircle of sixteen miles, halfway around the city from Roxbury Neck to the Mystic River. They soon learned that Gage intended to break through the American lines into the country for a supply of provisions. =162. Plans to checkmate the British.=--General Ward, having discovered that the British were planning to sally forth through Charlestown, determined to strike first and so defeat their project. It was decided to seize and fortify some suitable hill in Charlestown. Colonel William Prescott, a well-tried soldier of the French-Indian wars, and grandfather of Prescott, the famous historian, was ordered, on the sixteenth of June, to march that night with nearly a thousand men to Bunker Hill and throw up breastworks. Soon after sunset the soldiers were formed in a hollow square on Cambridge Common, and President Langdon of Harvard College offered prayer. The good man then gave them his blessing and bade them "Godspeed." At nine o'clock they started on their silent march. At Charlestown Neck they met General Putnam with more soldiers and wagon-loads of picks and shovels. =163. Entrenched on Bunker Hill.=--Prescott led them to the top of Bunker Hill. After consultation with his officers, he moved on through the darkness to Breed's Hill, which had a better command of the city and the shipping. The lines were soon staked out, and at midnight the farmer soldiers began their entrenchments. So rapidly did they work that the dim morning twilight disclosed a large square of fresh trenches crowning the hill, with long wings stretching right and left. They had made a fort in a single night. How surprised the British were at the sight, as the sun rose on a beautiful summer morning! They could scarcely believe their eyes. It seemed like a work of magic. A thousand men had shoveled as they never shoveled before, and not a British sentry had heard the click of their spades. They saw at once that the Americans, if they only had time enough to plant a battery of cannon there, could very soon drive them out of Boston. So the only thing for them to do was to drive the Americans from that hill, and that too without delay. Accordingly, the British men-of-war, Lively and Falcon, and then the forts on Copp's Hill in Boston immediately opened fire.