Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Frothingham in HSOB, describes how the letter from the town selectman was carried across the lines under a flag of truce (p. 301). Town selectman Timothy Newall provides an excellent on-the-scene account of the mixture of bedlam and fear in Boston as the Americans continued to move their fortifications ever closer along the ridge of Dorchester Heights in his Journal, pp. 273–76. The reference to “Great Britain being fast asleep” is in a March 7 letter in LAR, p. 279. The reference to the loyalists carrying “death in their faces” comes from a March 21 letter from Caleb Adams to General Folsom cited in Allen French’s FYAR, p. 664. Washington writes of the loyalists being “at their wit’s end” in a March 31, 1776, letter to John Augustine Washington in PGW, 3:568. Allen French in FYAR writes of the travails of the loyalists Adino Paddock, Benjamin Hallowell, and Harrison Gray, pp. 665–66. Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver estimated in French, FYAR, that of the 3,500 inhabitants in Boston toward the end of the Siege, “The loyal and their connections may amount to 2,000 and upwards. . . . There are, I suppose, 60 or 70 persons with their families who could never make their peace with the rebels” (p. 651). This means that only about half of those whom Oliver considered loyalists chose to sail to Halifax. My thanks to Gregory Whitehead for his insights regarding Boston’s “second culling” in a personal communication. Archibald Robertson describes his last day in Boston in his Journal, p. 79. Inventories of “British Stores Left in Boston” and “British Ordnance Stores Left in Boston” are in PGW, 3:525–27, 549–50. My thanks to Philip Budden for pointing out the significance of March 17 for Boston’s Irish population in a personal communication.

  John Sullivan in a March 19 extension of a letter started on March 17, 1776, to John Adams describes the “lifeless sentries” guarding the British fortress at Bunker Hill, in Taylor, Founding Families. James Wilkinson writes of Boston on evacuation day in his Memoirs, p. 32–33. James Thacher writes of the “melancholy gloom” of the Bostonians in his Journal, pp. 41–42. John Andrews writes of how his longing for his wife Ruthy has not prevented him from feeling a sense of optimism throughout the siege in LJA, p. 411. Archibald Robertson describes assisting John Montresor in the destruction of the Castle in his Diary, pp. 80–81. Washington writes of “lamenting the disappointment” of not having been allowed to attack Boston in a March 27, 1776, letter to Landon Carter, in PGW, 3:545. The “Address from the Boston Selectmen” thanking Washington for “the recovery of this town” is in PGW (3:571–72), as is Washington’s “Address to the Boston Selectmen and Citizens” (3:572–73) and his March 7 installment of a letter started on February 26 to Joseph Reed, in which he claims, “I will not lament or repine at any act of Providence because I am in a great measure a convert to Mr. Pope’s opinion that whatever is, is right” (3:373–74).

  John Warren writes of retrieving his brother’s body from Breed’s Hill in his journal, which is quoted in Edward Warren’s Life of John Warren, p. 74. John Rowe writes of being insulted at Joseph Warren’s funeral in his Diary, p. 307. Clifford Shipton details the demise of Benjamin Church in SHG, 13:395–97. A. W. H. Eaton in The Famous Mather Byles writes about the minister losing his congregation in 1776; he recounts Byles’s comment about being ruled by “one tyrant 3,000 miles away” instead of “3,000 tyrants not a mile away” (pp. 146–47), as well as Byles’s pun about his “observe-a-Tory” (p. 173). Albert Mathews in “Joyce, Junior” quotes from the advertisement in the March 17, 1777, Boston Gazette in which Joyce Jr. refers to taking action against the “shameless brass-faced Tories who have the audaciousness to remain” (p. 94). Abigail Adams describes Joyce Junior’s carting of the loyalists across the town line in an April 20, 1777, letter in Taylor, Founding Families. Washington’s General Orders forbidding the observance of “that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the effigy of the Pope” can be found in PGW, 2:300. Esther Forbes in Paul Revere cites Revere’s April 1777 letter to John Lamb in which he writes, “I find but few of the Sons of Liberty in the army” (p. 323). Ruth Bloch in Visionary Republic cites Thomas Paine’s claim that the “birthday of a new world is at hand” (p. 75). J. L. Bell in his July 4, 2007, Boston 1775 blog entry, “Sheriff Greenleaf and Col. Crafts Read the Declaration,” cites Greenleaf’s son’s account of his father and Crafts declaiming the Declaration of Independence, http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2007/07/sheriff-greenleaf-and-col-crafts-read.html. Abigail Adams’s account of the event is in a July 21, 1776, letter to John Adams in Taylor, Founding Families.

  Epilogue—Character Alone

  John Quincy Adams’s account of what he did on June 17, 1843, can be found in his Diary at the MHS; my thanks to Mike Hill for providing me with a transcript. My account of the festivities surrounding the sixty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill is based on articles in the June 19, 1843, issue of the Daily Atlas and the June 22, 1843, issue of the Emancipator and Free American. My account of John Quincy Adams’s late career in the U.S. House of Representatives is based largely on Paul Nagel’s John Quincy Adams, in which he details Quincy’s role in the Amistad trial (pp. 379–80) and the House censure trial (pp. 386), in which Nagel quotes the description of Quincy as “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” Nagel cites Quincy’s claim that “the world will retire from me before I shall retire from the world” (p. 381). Concerning Joseph Warren’s saving Quincy’s forefinger from amputation, Nagel writes, “JQA often considered how brief his diary and letters might have been if his writing hand had been maimed” (p. 8). Abigail Adams’s account of seeing Trumbull’s painting The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, in which she refers to “character alone,” is in a March 4, 1786, letter to Elizabeth Smith Shaw in Adams Family Correspondence, 7:82. She writes of curbing the “unlimited power” a husband has over a wife and of how “the passion of liberty cannot be equally strong” in a slaveholder in a March 31, 1776, letter to John Adams, in Adams Family Correspondence, 1:569–70. Paul Nagel cites John Quincy Adams’s insistence that “My life must be militant to its close” in John Quincy Adams, p. 328. As Nagel writes in his biography, John Quincy Adams died on February 23, 1848, from the effects of a stroke he suffered while rising to speak on the House floor.

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