Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Joseph Tinker Buckingham in Specimens of Newspaper Literature, vol. 2, tells of Benjamin Russell and his classmates at the Queen Street Writing School on April 19 and how they followed Percy’s brigade to Cambridge (pp. 2–3). William Gordon in his History, vol. 1, recounts the anecdote about Percy’s fifers playing “Yankee Doodle” and the boy’s teasing remark about the ballad “Chevy Chase” (p. 481). John Eliot in Brief Biographical Sketches tells how Warren’s “soul beat to arms” when he heard the news from Lexington (p. 473). Frothingham in LJW describes how Warren turned over his medical practice to Eustis, then took the ferry to Charlestown, on which he told a compatriot to “keep up a brave heart!” (pp. 456–57). Isaiah Thomas in The History of Printing in America says he accompanied Warren to Charlestown (p. 168). Frothingham relates an account from a Dr. Welch, who claimed to have accompanied Warren out of Charlestown, as well as how Warren drove off the two soldiers trying to steal a horse, in LJW, p. 457. William Heath tells of his military studies in his Memoirs, pp. 1–4. Samuel Knapp in Sketches writes of how Warren felt it was “indispensable” that he get sufficient military experience that “his reputation for bravery might be put beyond the possibility of suspicion” (p. 119).

  Cyrus Hamlin writes of Francis Faulkner’s youthful experiences on April 19 in My Grandfather, Colonel Francis Faulkner, pp. 5–6. In an April 28, 1775, letter in AA4, a regular tells of how the militiamen “ran to the woods like devils” when the British lit the houses on fire (2:440). Joseph Loring in JEPC lists “200 rods of stone wall thrown down” in an account of damages inflicted by the British troops (p. 686). Lieutenant Lister recounts his conversation with Smith on the night of April 18 in Kehoe, as well as how Smith later offered him his horse as the column left Lexington (pp. 115, 117–18). Lieutenant Barker’s description of Smith as a “fat heavy man” is in his Diary, p. 34. William Heath writes in his Memoirs of how he “assisted in forming a regiment, which had been broken by the shot from the British fieldpieces,” as well as how Joseph Warren “kept with him” throughout that afternoon and evening (pp. 7–8). General Percy writes of how the militiamen clustered around the column “like a moving circle” in an April 20, 1775, letter to General Harvey in his Letters, p. 52. The description of how the westerly wind created “such a cloud that blinded” the regulars yet left them “a plain mark for the militia” is in Box 1, Folder 1, U.S. Revolution Collection, 1754–1928, AAS. Lieutenant Mackenzie writes of the fire being as bad in the front of the column as it was in the rear in his Diary, p. 57. Lieutenant Lister describes how he used a horse as a shield in Kehoe, p. 118. A summary of Ensign Martin Hunter’s account of “men clinging in numbers [to the carriages of the fieldpieces] and tumbling off when the cannon halted to fire,” is in Kehoe, p. 150. John Galvin writes of how “Heath’s firm grasp of the tactics of the skirmish line and his tendency to see any battle as a series of isolated little fights was just what the provincials needed” in The Minute Men, p. 206. I find it interesting that, except for Heath’s own memoirs, there are virtually no contemporary accounts describing Heath’s leadership role during the afternoon of June 19; if a person is singled out, it’s inevitably Joseph Warren, but more as a charismatic cheerleader than a strategist or tactician. If anything, the fighting during Percy’s march from Lexington to Charlestown seems to have been even wilder and less controlled than it had been during Smith’s retreat from Concord, when all agreed the militiamen fought “with little or no military discipline and order.” Whatever leadership was being exerted on the side of the provincials was coming from the company captains with previous military experience in the French and Indian War, most of whom had little or no contact with General Heath—a point that Percy makes when he says in his Letters, “They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about” (p. 53).

  David Hackett Fischer in Paul Revere’s Ride writes about the differences between the scarlet uniforms of the British officers and the faded red coats of the rank and file (p. 122). Lieutenant Mackenzie writes of the effectiveness of the provincials who used their horses to ride ahead of the column and then wait in ambush in his Diary, p. 67. In my account I have resisted the temptation to describe the legendary activities of one Hezekiah Wyman, a long-haired old man on a white horse, who reputedly killed many a regular on that bloody afternoon, and who does not appear in the literature until the publication of a widely reprinted article titled “The White Horseman,” which first appeared in the August 22, 1835, Boston Pearl and Literary Gazette. See J. L. Bell’s series on the subject in his blog Boston 1775, which begins with his May 29, 2010, entry “Hunting for Hezekiah Wyman”; http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2010/05/hunting-for-hezekiah-wyman.html. If there was a miraculous warrior on a white horse that day, it was General Percy, whom even the understated Lieutenant Mackenzie described in his Diary as behaving “with great spirit throughout this affair and at the same time with great coolness” (p. 59). John Eliot in Brief Biographical Sketches describes Warren as “perhaps the most active man in the field” (p. 473). William Heath in his Memoirs tells of how “a musket ball came so near to the head of Dr. Warren, as to strike the pin out of the hair of his earlock” (p. 8). Samuel Knapp writes of how “the people were delighted with his cool, collected bravery” (p. 116).

  Thomas Thorp describes how the Acton militiamen “were putting powder (flour) on their hair” before heading out to Concord in a deposition appended to Josiah Adams’s Letter to Lemuel Shattuck, p. 15. J. W. Hanson in History of Danvers writes of Jotham Webb’s determination to “die in my best clothes” (p. 297; cited by Ellen Chase in BAR, 3:128). Chase provides a useful synthesis of accounts from Hanson, Hurd’s History of Middlesex County, and other sources in BAR, 3:130–35. See also Samuel Abbot Smith’s West Cambridge 1775, in which he repeats Mrs. Russell’s claim that the south room was “almost ankle deep” in blood and describes the burial of the bodies “head to point,” pp. 37–39, 52. My summary of the other incidents that occurred in Menotomy is based on BAR, 3:122–24, 145–47, 157–59, and Smith’s West Cambridge 1775, pp. 34–37, 42–44. William Heath tells in his Memoirs how he had instructed the Watertown militia to go to Cambridge “to take up the planks, barricade the south end of the bridge, and there to take post; that, in case the British should, on their return, take that road to Boston, their retreat might be impeded” (p. 7). John Andrews writes of watching the progress of the British column down the Battle Road from the hills of Boston in an April 19, 1775, letter in LJA, p. 405. Jane Mecom in The Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom describes “the horror the town was in” on that day in a May 14, 1775, letter to her brother Benjamin Franklin (p. 154). The Reverend Samuel West’s description of watching the fighting from his house in Needham as he and his parishioners feared the worst, as well as his troubling portrayal of a once “mild and gentle” people turned “ferocious and cruel,” are available online at http://www2.needham.k12.ma.us/eliot/technology/lessons/primary_source/lex_con/memoir.htm. Samuel Abbot Smith recounts in West Cambridge 1775 how the women gathered at the house of George Prentiss in Menotomy feared that the slave Ishmael had come “to kill us” (p. 50). J. H. Temple in History of Framingham describes the women’s fear of a slave revolt (p. 275). William Heath writes of how “the flashes of the muskets [were] very visible” as the British approached Charlestown; he also speculates that “their retreat would have been cut off” if Pickering and his men from Salem had marched with a little more fortitude, in his Memoirs, pp. 8–9. Clifford Shipton provides an insightful sketch of Timothy Pickering Jr. in SHG, vol. 15, describing Pickering’s nearsightedness and the way the light reflected on his spectacles at night (pp. 453–54). Timothy Pickering writes of believing “that a pacification upon honorable terms is practicable” in an April 26, 1775, letter in Octavius Pickering, The Life of Timothy Pickering, 1:80–82.

  Chapter Eight—No Business but That of War

  Sarah Winslow Deming writes of her departure from Boston in a journal she addressed to her ni
ece at MHS. She describes Boston as a “city of destruction” in her April 20, 1775, entry, in which she recounts how she and her two friends left the city and spent the night in Roxbury. Hannah Winthrop tells of her travels with her husband John in an undated letter to Mercy Otis Warren, pp. 29–31. David McClure writes of “the dreadful trophies of war” in his Diary, pp. 155–61. Deacon Tudor tells of the rumor “that if the soldiers came out again they would burn, kill, and destroy,” in the April 20, 1775, entry in his Diary. Jeremy Lister describes his return to Boston after the march back from Concord in his Narrative, pp. 33–35. Admiral Graves recounts how he suggested that Gage allow him to cannonade Charlestown and Roxbury in his Narrative in NDAR, 1:193. Timothy Pickering writes about his April 20 meeting in Cambridge with militia officers and members of the Committee of Safety in an April 26, 1775, letter in Octavius Pickering, The Life of Timothy Pickering, 1:80–82, and in a June 26, 1807, letter cited in Allen French’s FYAR, in which Pickering states, “I had no previous information of the plans of patriotism or ambition (and I now believe the latter was as powerful a stimulus as the former) of the leaders in the intended revolution” (pp. 26–27). Frothingham cites Joseph Warren’s April 20, 1775, circular letter in which he claims, “Our all is at stake,” as well as his April 20, 1775, letter to Gage, in LJW, pp. 466–67.

  Charles Martyn describes Artemas Ward’s arrival in Cambridge in his biography of the general, pp. 89–90. For information on General John Thomas, I have relied on Charles Coffin’s Life and Services of Major General John Thomas, pp. 3–8. On recruitment in Massachusetts during the French and Indian wars, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army, pp. 39–48. The resolution that the recruitment of enslaved African Americans reflected “dishonor on this colony” is in the May 20, 1775, minutes of the Committee of Safety, JEPC, p. 553. Joseph Tinker Buckingham in Specimens of Newspaper Literature, vol. 2, tells of how Benjamin Russell and his classmates found themselves marooned in Cambridge and how they attached themselves to the officers of the provincial army (p. 4). Paul Revere relates the conversation that followed Benjamin Church’s announcement that he had decided to pay a visit to Boston, as well as how Church pointed out the stain of blood on his stockings, in “A Letter . . . to the Corresponding Secretary,” pp. 110–11. Lysander Salmon Richards in his History of Marshfield tells of the wine closet Nesbitt Balfour built in the cellar of the Thomas house during the winter of 1775 (pp. 117–18). Allen French provides a detailed account of the militia’s tentative and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to prevent Balfour’s detachment from escaping from Marshfield in FYAR, pp. 28–30. My thanks to J. L. Bell in a personal communication for pointing out that Isaac Bissell’s first name was changed to Israel as the result of a copyist’s mistake as the message about the fighting at Lexington was carried from town to town. For an account of Bissell’s ride from Boston to New York and the spread of news of the fighting at Lexington throughout the colonies, see John Schiede, “The Lexington Alarm,” pp. 47–50, 62–75. For the activities of the Provincial Congress on April 22 and 23, 1775, see JEPC, pp. 147–50.

  On Gage’s negotiations with the town and the April 27 surrender of thousands of firearms on the part of the Boston residents as well as the loyalists’ insistence that the agreement not be honored, see Frothingham’s History of the Siege of Boston (HSOB), pp. 94–96. John Andrews tells of his decision to stay in Boston despite his wife’s decision to flee in an April 24, 1775, letter in LJA, pp. 405–6. Andrew Eliot writes of his intention to stay in Boston in a May 31, 1775, letter at MHS, in which he also writes of the “grass growing in the public walks and streets”; Eliot writes of “more than nine thousand” Bostonians having left the city in a June 19, 1775, letter to Isaac Smith, in MHS Proceedings, 1878, p. 287. Peter Oliver describes the town as “a perfect skeleton” in OPAR, p. 124. By March 1776 the British army in Boston had reached 8,906 men, including officers: see DAR 10:246. An April 25, 1775, intelligence report to Gage states that “Colo. Putnam proposes [attacking Boston from the Neck] by advancing large bodies of screwed hay before them”; the report also claims that “flat boats” are being built by the provincials in Watertown and Cambridge, in PIR, 3:1984–85; an April 30 intelligence report claims “that they had returns last evening from Wellfleet, upon the Cape Cod shore, that three hundred whale boats were ready, and they still talk of burning the ships,” PIR, 3:1987; a May 28 intelligence report claims that there is a provincial plan to “make their way good into town by boats, numbers of which of the whale boat kind are provided, from Nantucket, Cape Cod and all that coast to the amount of 500,” in PIR, 3:1994. Paul Litchfield writes of the whaleboats passing along the Scituate shore in a June 10, 1775, entry of his Diary, p. 378. On May 27, 1775, fifty whaleboats were confiscated from Nantucket by provincial forces and taken to Cape Cod for ultimate delivery to the Boston area, as described in Edouard Stackpole’s Nantucket in the American Revolution, p. 15.

  My account of the race between the Quero and Sukey depends on Robert Rantoul, “The Cruise of the Quero,” pp. 1–4, and James Duncan Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 364–67. Josiah Quincy Jr.’s final wishes are recorded in the end of his London Journal in Portrait of a Patriot, vol. 1, edited by Daniel Coquillette and Neil Longley York, pp. 267–69. Joseph Warren’s April 27, 1775, letter to Arthur Lee appears in Frothingham’s LJW, p. 471. The resolves providing annuities for artillery officers William Burbeck and Richard Gridley are in JEPC, pp. 153, 157. Allen French provides a good summary of Benedict Arnold’s activities in Boston as well as during the taking of Ticonderoga in FYAR, pp. 149–52; the evolution of the Committee of Safety’s decision to employ Arnold in this “secret service” can be traced in JEPC, pp. 531, 532, 534. Samuel Forman points out that the powder Warren gave to Arnold’s expedition to Ticonderoga “could have made all the difference if made available to Prescott’s beleaguered Americans” on Bunker Hill in DJW, p. 298. Joseph Warren’s letter to Connecticut governor Trumbull is in LJW, pp. 475–76; Frothingham discusses Gage’s dealings with the delegation from Connecticut in HSOB, pp. 104–5; see also Allen French’s FYAR, pp. 132–34, which includes Jedediah Huntington’s claim that Gage was “wicked, infamous, and base without a parallel.” Frothingham in LJW tells of the committee from the Provincial Congress appointed to “wait on Warren, to know whether he could serve them as their president”; he also quotes Warren’s note in which he replies that “he will obey their order,” p. 475. The minutes from May 2, 1775, of the Second Provincial Congress indicate that frustrations with Warren’s lack of attendance led to the election of Colonel James Warren of Plymouth (husband of Mercy Otis Warren) to the presidency, but after James Warren declined to serve that same day (“after offering his reasons for excuse”), a committee was selected to talk to Joseph Warren about retaining the presidency, an office he held until his death (JEPC, p. 178).

  Fears concerning an imminent British attack around May 10 are evident in the congressional minutes, in JEPC, pp. 210–15; see also Frothingham in HSOB, p. 107. The best account of Church’s role in the mix-up with General Thomas in Roxbury is in Charles Martyn’s Life of Artemas Ward, pp. 102–4. The most helpful transcription of what is evidently Benjamin Church’s espionage report to Gage written about May 10, 1775, is in PIR, 3:1988–90; see also French’s Gage’s Informers, pp. 151–53. The resolution for “a day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer” on May 11, 1775, is in the April 15 minutes of the second Provincial Congress; citizens were instructed to “humble themselves before God, under the heavy judgments felt and feared, to confess the sins that have deserved them, to implore the forgiveness of all our transgressions, a spirit of repentance and reformation, and . . . that America may soon behold a gracious interposition of Heaven for the redress of her many grievances, the restoration of all her invaded liberties, and their security to the latest generations” (JEPC, p. 145). Captain George Harris’s May 5, 1775, letter describing the beauty of what he sees from his tent door on Boston Common is in
The Life and Services of General Lord Harris, edited by Stephen Lushington, p. 39. Nathaniel Ames records “Public Fast for the times. Dr. Warren here” in the May 11, 1775, entry of his Diary, p. 280; Ames also indicates that the weather was fair on that day.