Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Warren’s confidential May 10, 1775, letter to Gage in which he says “no person living knows, or ever will know from me of my writing this,” is in PIR, 3:2076. On the significance of the ceremony of the fast to New England and America in general in the eighteenth century, see Perry Miller’s “The Moral and Psychological Roots of American Resistance”; according to Miller, “New England clergy had so merged the call to repentance with a stiffening of the patriotic spine that no power on earth . . . could separate the acknowledgment of depravity from the resolution to fight” (p. 256). The May 12, 1775, reference to Congress debating “where there is now existing in this colony a necessity of taking up and exercising the powers of civil government, in all its parts” is in JEPC, p. 219. On May 10, 1775, the Congress considered accusations of disloyalty against Samuel Paine, who was accused of claiming “that those quartered in the colleges were lousy” (JEPC, p. 214). James Stevens tells of the difficulty Captain Thomas Poor had with his men in a May 10 entry in his Journal, p. 44. David Avery refers to the muskets being fired, “one out of our window,” in the May 8 entry of his Diary, p. 27. Amos Farnsworth’s reference to “ejaculation, prayers, and praise” is in the June 5–6, 1775, entry of his Diary, p. 82. Ezekiel Price speaks of the “high spirits” of the provincial soldiers in Roxbury in the June 7, 1775, entry of his Diary, p. 188. The unnamed British surgeon’s description of the provincial encampment in Cambridge is in a May 26, 1775, letter in LAR, p. 120. A June espionage report speaks of hearing officers “complaining much of the private men having the superiority over the officers, rather than the officers over the men,” in PIR, 4:2779. Allen French in FYAR includes the quote (from Benjamin Edwards) describing the Committee of Safety as “a pack of sappy-headed fellows,” p. 70. Abijah Brown’s complaints against the Provincial Congress are in AA4, 2:720–21. Joseph Warren’s May 17, 1775, letter to Samuel Adams, in which he talks about how “the strings must not be drawn too tight at first” when it comes to applying discipline to the provincial army, is in Frothingham’s LJW, p. 485.

  John Barker’s May 1, 1775, reference to the “Pretty Burlesque!” of the provincial claims of loyalty to the king is in his Diary, p. 40. Joseph Warren writes of the need for a “generalissimo” in his May 17, 1775, letter to Samuel Adams in Frothingham’s LJW, p. 485. Warren writes of his affection for the provincial soldiers in a May 26, 1775, letter to Samuel Adams in Frothingham’s LJW, pp. 495–96. John Eliot writes of Warren’s “influence” with the army and how “he did wonders in preserving order among the troops” in Brief Biographical Sketches, p. 473. Joseph Warren speaks of the “errors [the soldiers] have fallen into” in a May 26, 1775, letter to Samuel Adams in LJW, p. 496. Frothingham, in HSOB, cites an article in the June 8, 1775, issue of the Essex Gazette that refers to “the grand American army” (p. 101). Benjamin Church’s espionage report to Gage, in which he speaks of the “vexation” he feels at having been chosen to go to Philadelphia at the end of May, is in PIR, 3:1992–93. On Church’s return to the Boston area on the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, see Clifford Shipton’s “Benjamin Church,” SHG, 13:388. John Barker describes Israel Putnam’s brazen march into Charlestown in front of the guns of the Somerset in the May 13 entry of his Diary, p. 46. For an account of the incident at Grape Island on Sunday, May 21, 1775, see the article, probably written by Joseph Warren, that appeared in the Essex Gazette and is reprinted in Frothingham’s LJW, pp. 492–93, as well as Abigail Adams’s May 24, 1775, letter to John Adams in Adams Family Correspondence, edited by L. H. Butterfield, pp. 204–6. For my account of the Battle of Chelsea Creek, I have depended on Chelsea Creek: First Naval Engagement of the American Revolution, by Victor Mastone, Craig Brown, and Christopher Maio; and Vincent Tentindo’s and Marylyn Jones’s Battle of Chelsea Creek, May 27, 1775: Graves’ Misfortune. Both studies contain extensive amounts of primary source material from contemporary diaries, letters, logs, and newspapers. See also NDAR, 1:544–46. Amos Farnsworth writes about his experiences during the skirmishes associated with the battle in the May 27, 1775, entry of his Diary, pp. 80–81. Charles Chauncy, in a July 8, 1775, letter to Richard Price, writes, “I heard General Putnam say, who had the command of our detachment, that the most of the time he and his men were fighting there was nothing between them and the fire of the enemy but pure air”; Tentindo and Jones, Battle of Chelsea Creek, p. 102. The account of the conversation among Putnam, Ward, and Joseph Warren after the Battle of Chelsea Creek is in “Colonel Daniel Putnam’s Letter Relative to the Battle of Bunker Hill and General Israel Putnam,” p. 285.

  Chapter Nine—The Redoubt

  My account of the Quero’s arrival in England is based on Robert Rantoul’s “The Cruise of the Quero,” which includes Walpole’s reference to John Derby as the “Accidental Captain,” as well as the letter referring to the “total confusion and consternation” of the ministers, along with Gibbon’s remarks on the incident, and Dartmouth’s frustrated letter to Gage, pp. 4–30. I’ve also consulted James Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 367–69, and George Daughan, If by Sea, pp. 14–16. Richard Frothingham quotes the doggerel about the three British generals from The Gentleman’s Magazine in HSOB, p. 8. Frothingham quotes a contemporary newspaper report describing the meeting of the Cerberus and a packet bound for Newport during which Burgoyne made the comment about “elbowroom” in HSOB, p. 114. On Burgoyne I have consulted Edward De Fonblanque’s Life and Correspondence and George Athan Billias’s “John Burgoyne: Ambitious General,” in George Washington’s Generals and Opponents, edited by George Athan Billias, pp. 142–65; on Howe I have looked to Bellamy Partridge, Sir Billy Howe, pp. 1–25; Troyer Anderson, The Command of the Howe Brothers, pp. 42–84; Ira Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution, pp. 3–71; and Maldwyn Jones, “Sir William Howe: Conventional Strategist” in George Washington’s Generals and Opponents, edited by George Athan Billias, pp. 39–50. On Clinton, I have consulted William Willcox’s Portrait of a General, pp. 40–50 (which contains Clinton’s description of himself as a “shy bitch”); and Willcox’s “Sir Henry Clinton: Paralysis of Command,” in George Washington’s Generals and Opponents, edited by George Athan Billias, pp. 73–76. Gage’s June 12, 1775, Proclamation (ghostwritten by Burgoyne) is in PIR, 4:2769–72; Gage’s letter of the same date to Lord Dartmouth, in which he explains that there is no longer any “prospect of any offers of accommodation,” is in DAR, 9:171. Burgoyne complains of the “vacuum” that surrounds him in a June 25 letter to Rochford in E. D. de Fonblanque, Political and Military Episodes, p. 143. Howe’s June 12, 1775, letter to his brother Richard, in which he explains the plan to take Dorchester Heights, Charlestown, and ultimately Cambridge, is in Proceedings of the Bunker Hill Monument Association, 1907, pp. 112–17.

  The meeting between Joseph Warren and John Jeffries is described in a May 22, 1875, letter written by Jeffries’s son and “derived from statements of my father,” titled “A Tory Surgeon’s Experiences,” pp. 729–32. J. L. Bell, in the October 18, 2007, entry of his blog Boston 1775 (http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2007/10/dr-joseph-warrens-body-first.html), expresses his doubts that the meeting between Warren and Jeffries ever happened—quite rightly describing Jeffries as a “slippery character” and pointing out that when Jeffries later returned to Boston after years away in England, it was useful to have been once sought after by Joseph Warren. I am inclined, however, to believe Jeffries’s account. Given Warren’s difficulties with Benjamin Church and his willingness to communicate directly with the supposed enemy (as attested to by his correspondence with Gage), as well as his obvious love of risk, this sounds like just the kind of thing he would have done when circumstances required him to find a surgeon general. Also, Jeffries’s account as reported by his son gets corroboration of sorts in Samuel Swett’s History of Bunker Hill, which includes a reference to Warren’s visit to Jeffries (p. 58). Another intriguing reference comes from the loyalist Peter Oliver, who writes of “a gentleman who was tampered with by .
. . Major Genl. Warren. . . . Warren was in hopes to take this gentleman into their number, and laid open their whole scheme. He told him that ‘Independence was their object; that it was supposed that Great Britain would resent it and would lay the town of Boston in ashes, from their ships; that an estimate had accordingly been made of the value of the estates in town; and that they had determined to pay the losses of their friends from the estates of the loyalists in the country.’ The gentleman refused to join with them, but Warren replied that they would pursue their scheme” (OPAR, p. 148). Was Jeffries the “gentleman” referred to by Oliver? If he was, the midnight conversation between the two men appears to have been in line with the earlier impression Timothy Pickering had of Warren after the post–Lexington and Concord meeting on April 20 in Cambridge.

  The May 30, 1775, espionage report to Gage describing the North End as “a nest of very wicked fellows” is in PIR, 3:1994–95. The espionage report claiming that “the men that go in the ferry-boats are not faithful” is in PIR, 4:2776–77. John Adams’s memory of how Joseph Warren spoke of “the selfishness of this people, or their impatient eagerness for commissions” is in a February 18, 1811, letter to Josiah Quincy in his Works, 9:633; in the same letter Adams also makes the claim that “there is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America . . . the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest.” John Bell’s July 30, 2006, entry to his blog Boston 1775 describes how John Jeffries worked the British patronage system once he moved to London after the evacuation of Boston (http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2006/07/dr-john-jeffries-physician-loyalist_30.html). Edmund Morgan in Inventing the People writes of how the “decline of deference and emergence of leadership signaled the beginnings . . . [of] a new way of determining who should stand among the few to govern the many” (p. 302). Joseph Warren’s May 14, 1775, letter to Samuel Adams in which he writes of his hope that in the future “the only road to promotion may be through the affection of the people. This being the case, the interest of the governor and the governed will be the same” is reprinted in Frothingham’s LJW, pp. 483–84.

  The statement that Warren had “fully resolved that his future service should be in the military line” is also in LJW, p. 510, as is the statement that Warren was “proposed as a physician-general; but preferring a more active and hazardous employment, he accepted a major-general’s commission” (p. 504). Allen French writes that the “choice of Joseph Warren [as major general] was strange. . . . Not one high office had yet been given to an inexperienced man. . . . But such were his enthusiasm and magnetism, and so great was the confidence felt in his talents and devotion, that the position was given him, with tragic results” (FYAR, pp. 72–73). French claims that Warren’s only relevant experience was his time with the Committee of Safety but makes no reference to his conspicuous role on April 19 and his presence at the skirmishes at Grape Island and Chelsea Creek. French also writes of Heath’s less than enthusiastic reaction to Warren’s elevation to major general despite Warren’s letter to him “urging him to apply for his colonelcy. . . . Stubbornly, perhaps, Heath made no move” (p. 73). Warren’s June 16, 1775, letter to Heath is reprinted in LJW, p. 507. In his June 16 diary entry Ezekiel Price writes, “Colonel Richmond from the Congress says that Dr. Warren was chosen a major-general; that Heath was not chosen any office, but it was supposed that no difficulty would arise from it” (p. 190). John Adams’s statement that Joseph Warren “made a harangue in the form of a charge . . . to every officer, upon the delivery of his commission, and that he never failed to make the officer as well as all the assembly shudder” is in Works, 3:12.

  Allen French writes of the June 13 warning from the New Hampshire Committee of Safety about a report from “a gentleman of undoubted veracity” concerning an attack on Dorchester Heights on June 18 in FYAR, p. 209. Daniel Putnam recounts the conversation that Joseph Warren had with Putnam and others about Putnam’s early proposal to entrench Bunker Hill in his “Letter Relative to the Battle of Bunker Hill,” pp. 248–49. Allen French relates the process by which provincial leaders came to the decision to reinforce Bunker Hill on June 17 in FYAR, pp. 211–14; French repeats the claim that portions of Charlestown Neck were only thirty feet wide (p. 220). According to Francis Parker in Colonel William Prescott: The Commander in the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, “a serious engagement was neither intended nor expected as a result of the entrenching expedition,” adding that the decision to build on Breed’s Hill “was to change the whole character of the expedition” (p. 11). Samuel Gray, writing from Roxbury on July 12, 1775, makes the claim that “one general and the engineer were of opinion we ought not to entrench on Charlestown [i.e., Breed’s] Hill till we had thrown up some works on the north and south ends of Bunker Hill, to cover our men on their retreat . . . but on the pressing importunity of the other general officer, it was consented to begin as was done,” in the appendix to HSOB, p. 394. Ebenezer Bancroft, in John Hill’s Bi-Centennial of Old Dunstable, believed it was Putnam who voted to go with Breed’s instead of Bunker Hill: “The dispute which delayed the commencing of the work was probably on the part of Prescott insisting that his orders were to fortify Bunker’s Hill, and Putnam and Gridley insisting that Breed’s Hill was the proper place” (p. 66). Prescott’s son, however, saw it differently: “Colonel Prescott conferred with his officers and Colonel Gridley as to the place intended for the fortification; but Colonel Prescott took on himself the responsibility of deciding, as well he might, for on him it would rest”; Frothingham, The Battle Field of Bunker Hill, p. 29. In an August 25, 1775, letter to John Adams, William Prescott makes the technically inaccurate statement “I received orders to march to Breed’s Hill. . . . The lines were drawn by the engineer and we began the entrenchment about 12 o’clock,” in the appendix to HSOB, p. 395. The Committee of Safety’s account of the battle, in which they refer to the placement of the redoubt on Breed’s Hill being “some mistake,” is also in the appendix to HSOB, p. 382. In a July 20, 1775, letter to Samuel Adams, John Pitts wrote in French, FYAR, “Never was more confusion and less command,” adding, “No one appeared to have any but Col. Prescott whose bravery can never be enough acknowledged and applauded” (p. 228). French also describes the dimensions of the redoubt in FYAR, p. 216.

  Amos Farnsworth recounts how he and the others had “orders not to shut our eyes” as they waited in the Charlestown town house as sentries patrolled the waterfront and those on Breed’s Hill dug the redoubt in the early morning of June 17 in his Diary, p. 83. In Frothingham, The Battle-Field of Bunker Hill, William Prescott’s son tells of his father’s being “delighted to hear ‘All is well,’ drowsily repeated by the watch on board the king’s ships” (p. 19). Henry Clinton’s claim that “in the evening of the 16th I saw them at work, reported it to Genls Gage and Howe and advised a landing in two divisions at day break” is quoted in French, FYAR, pp. 209–10. According to Howe, Clinton wasn’t the only one who heard the provincials digging that night: “The sentries on the Boston side had heard the rebels at work all night without making any other report of it, except mention it in conversation” (CKG, p. 221). Peter Brown’s June 28, 1775, letter to his mother is quoted in Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1:595–96. On the death of Asa Pollard, see Samuel Swett’s History of Bunker Hill Battle, p. 22; Swett also cites a claim that Pollard’s heart “continued beating for some time after it was cut out of him by the cannonball” (p. 52). Prescott’s son tells in Frothingham’s Battle-Field of Bunker Hill how his father “mounted the parapet, walked leisurely backwards and forwards . . . It had the effect intended. The men soon became indifferent to the fire of the artillery” (pp. 19–20); Prescott’s son also wrote of his father’s determination to “never be taken alive” (p. 26). Prescott tells of how Gridley “forsook me” in an August 25, 1775, letter to John Adams in the appendix to HSOB, pp. 395–97. John Brooks, the twenty-three-year-old doctor who carried Prescott’s call for reinforcements to General Ward, later became governor of Massachusetts, and in 1818
he along with several of his staff walked Breed’s Hill, where he told William Sumner about Prescott’s histrionics on the redoubt wall; William Sumner, “Reminiscences of Gen. Warren and Bunker Hill,” p. 228. Prescott’s son recounts his father’s stubborn insistence that the men who had built the redoubt “should have the honor of defending [it]”; Frothingham, Battle-Field of Bunker Hill, p. 19.

  The claim that if Gage and Howe had followed Clinton’s advice they would have “shut [the provincials] up in the peninsula as in a bag” appears in a July 5, 1775, letter from an anonymous British officer in SSS, p. 135; this same account discusses the lack of reconnaissance on Howe’s part and its tragic consequences. In a June 20, 1775, letter, Lord Rawdon writes in SSS that the “men-of-war in the harbor could not elevate their guns sufficiently to bear upon [the redoubt]” (p. 130). Prescott’s son told of Gage’s conversation with Prescott’s brother-in-law Abijah Willard in Frothingham’s Battle-Field of Bunker Hill, p. 26–27. Paul Lockhardt in The Whites of Their Eyes is justifiably skeptical that this interchange ever occurred, claiming that “the idea that Willard could have seen and recognized Prescott, given the primitive optics of the day and the amount of gunsmoke that must have hung in the air, seems implausible at best” (footnote, p. 227). However, given that Prescott was dressed in a much-commented-on banyan (a loose-fitting coat), facial recognition probably was not required, and I’m inclined to believe the anecdote, particularly given the source and my own experience with telescopes from the eighteenth century.

  The activities of the Committee of Safety on June 17 can be traced to a limited extent in its minutes in JEPC, p. 570. Charles Martyn provides a useful analysis of the activities at Hastings House involving General Ward and the Committee of Safety in The Life of Artemas Ward, pp. 125–27, as does Paul Lockhardt in The Whites of Their Eyes, pp. 231–33. According to Samuel Swett, soon after the arrival of Major Brooks, Richard Devens’s “importunity with the general and the Committee [of Safety] for an ample reinforcement was impassioned and vehement, and his opinion partially prevailed; the committee recommended a reinforcement, and the general consented that orders should be dispatched immediately to Colonels Reed and Stark”; History of Bunker Hill Battle, p. 25. There are several accounts of Warren stating that it was his intention to join the fighting at Bunker Hill. Warren’s roommate Elbridge Gerry later told his biographer that Warren “entrusted to Mr. Gerry alone the secret of his intention to be on the field”; James Austin, The Life of Elbridge Gerry, 1:79. Warren’s apprentice David Townsend tells of Warren being “sick with one of his oppressive nervous headaches and, as usual, had retired to rest” in Hastings House on the morning of June 17; “Reminiscence of Gen. Warren,” p. 230. William Heath writes of Putnam and Prescott’s interchange about the entrenching tools in his Memoirs, p. 13. Ebenezer Bancroft’s account of using a cannon to blast out an embrasure is in his Narrative in John Hill’s Bi-Centennial of Old Dunstable, pp. 59–60. Bancroft later learned that the two cannonballs he had fired through the redoubt sailed all the way into Boston, with one landing harmlessly in Brattle Square, the other on Cornhill (p. 60). In a June 19, 1775, letter to Isaac Smith Jr., Andrew Eliot describes the provincials being “up to the chin entrenched” (p. 288). Colonel Jones’s June 19, 1775, account of what he appears to have seen while watching with Generals Burgoyne and Clinton on Copp’s Hill is in Frothingham’s Battle-Field of Bunker Hill, pp. 45–46. Burgoyne tells of his concern that the battle might result in “a final loss to the British Empire in America” in his June 25, 1775, letter to Lord Stanley in SSS, pp. 133–34.