by Ray Raphael
This story works because the words have been teased and the context ignored. A speech that called the king a “fool,†and Englishmen, Scots, and Britons “wretches,†would not be so celebrated today, and a man who catered to fears of slaves and Indians would not be quite so honored.
“ ‘Don’t throw away a single shot, my brave fellows,’ said old Putnam, ’till you can see the white of their eyes.’ â€
The Battle of Bunker Hill. Engraving, 1850s, based on painting by Alonzo Chappel.
10
THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES
During the Battle of Bunker Hill, the story goes, Israel Putnam (some say William Prescott) issued a command: “Do not fire till you see the whites of their eyes!†Displaying great courage and discipline in the face of advancing Redcoats, the untested patriots stood their ground and withheld their fire until they could gaze into the eyes of the enemy.
According to depositions of those who participated in the battle, American officers issued many commands: “Fire low.†“Aim at their waistbands.†“Pick off the commanders.†“Aim at the handsome coats.†“Powder must not be wasted.†“Wait until you see the white of their eyes.â€1 What is so special about the last one? Why has this particular idiom, which now exemplifies the story of Bunker Hill, been included among the classic tales of the American Revolution?
Soldiers who see the whites of the eyes of their adversaries must be fighting a very personalized, intimate sort of war—not like the industrialized warfare of later years. Man-to-man and honorably, a soldier could prove his valor by facing off against his adversary. This is what “the whites of their eyes†story gives us. It sets the Revolutionary War in a class by itself. Those were the days, we imagine, when a man could look the enemy directly in the eyes before shooting him down.
AN EXPERIMENT
The “whites of their eyes†command was not new to the American Revolution. Prince Charles of Prussia supposedly issued it in 1745, as did Frederick the Great in 1757. They were probably not the only ones. During the Revolution itself, other officers at other battles were said to have spoken these words.2 “Do not fire until you see the whites of their eyes†was a figure of speech, a common idiom used by eighteenth-century officers to gain control over their soldiers’ fire.
Let’s imagine Revolutionary soldiers did obey the order exactly as stated. When would they be allowed to shoot? At what distance can a person see the whites of another person’s eyes?
Try this experiment. Have someone charge at you, then signal when you can see the whites of the aggressor’s eyes. Have a third party note the spot and measure how close it is to you. If you actually do see the whites of eyes at more than ten yards, you have unusually keen vision.
Now repeat the experiment in a battlefield simulation. Have hundreds of people march toward you in full battle gear and kicking up dust, or if that is too difficult to arrange, settle for just a dozen or two marching toward you with long sticks to represent muskets and bayonets, finally breaking their rhythmic gait into a rapid assault. At what point, exactly, can you see the whites of the eyes of the enemy? Five yards? Perhaps less? Certainly not much more. Do you really wish to wait that long until you fire? How could you and your compatriots possibly reload for a second volley?
Clearly, the command was not meant to be taken literally, as we infer now. When officers issued this order, as many did, they were telling their soldiers to focus hard on the enemy and hold their fire until further command. They were not telling them to fire only when the enemy had advanced to within five or ten yards.
Once, an American officer did insist that soldiers hold their fire till the enemy was only about ten yards away. On May 29, 1780, at Waxhaws, South Carolina, Colonel Abraham Buford ordered his troops not to shoot until the British legion, commanded by Banastre Tarleton, was almost upon them. The single volley proved insufficient to stop the charge, and the patriots were immediately overrun.3 One hundred thirteen patriots were killed immediately and another 203 were captured, most of whom had been wounded. British losses, by contrast, were only five killed and twelve wounded. This real-life experiment at close firing failed miserably.
Americans often point to the “massacre†at Waxhaws as an example of British cruelty (see chapter 12). Whether or not Tarleton’s men killed soldiers trying to surrender, as patriots later claimed, the battle certainly revealed the ugly face of close combat. When soldiers fought each other with swords, musket butts, and bayonets, battles were likely to turn into slaughters. If “the whites of their eyes†were actually sighted, things could turn nasty indeed.
“CANNONS ROARING MUSKETS CRACKING DRUMS BEATING BUMBS FLYING ALL ROUNDâ€
Sometimes, a Revolutionary soldier could see into the whites of the eyes of the enemy; far more often, he could not. Most men who died never even saw their slayers. In fact, the majority of soldiers who perished did so from diseases or while languishing in prisons. With soldiers coming together in crowded and often unsanitary conditions, typhoid fever, typhus, dysentery, and smallpox ran rampant. Close contact with one’s fellow soldiers took more lives than close contact with the enemy. According to military historian Howard Peckham, approximately 10,000 patriots died in camp. Another 7,000 died as prisoners of war, primarily by catching diseases from each other. By contrast, Peckham recorded 6,824 deaths from battle casualties.4
Those who succumbed in battle were often mowed down by cannons or muskets fired in their general direction by men from afar. The war that brought our nation into existence did not feature direct man-to-man combat nearly so often as we would like to believe; conversely, it did feature distant killing much more often than we prefer to imagine. While soldiers in the infantry were making or resisting a charge, their counterparts in the artillery, working in teams of three to fifteen, were loading cannons, mortars, and howitzers and letting them loose on an anonymous enemy. These weapons featured not only solid shot but also grapeshot, canister shot, and bombs that exploded—antipersonnel ammunition designed to maim or take human life. The point of soldiering, then as now, was not only to display individual valor but to kill strangers from as safe a distance as possible—the farther away the better. Consider these firsthand accounts by participants in the Revolutionary War:
Cannons Roaring muskets Cracking Drums Beating Bumbs Flying all Round. Men a dying woundeds Horred Grones which would Greave the Heardist of Hearts to See Such a Dollful Sight as this to See our Fellow Creators Slain in Such a manner.
—Private Elisha Stevens, the Battle of Brandywine5
At length we fired the first gun, and immediately a tremendous cannonade—about one hundred and eighty, or two hundred pieces of heavy cannon—were discharged at the same moment. The mortars from both sides threw out an enormous number of shells. It was a glorious sight to see them, like meteors, crossing each other, and bursting in the sky. It appeared as if the stars were tumbling down. The fire was incessant almost the whole night, cannonballs whizzing, and shells hissing, continually among us, ammunition chests and temporary magazines blowing up, great guns bursting, and wounded men groaning along the lines. It was a dreadful night! It was our last great effort, but it availed us nothing. After it, our military ardor was much abated.
—William Moultrie, the first Battle of Charleston6
During the whole night, at intervals of a quarter or half an hour, the enemy would let off all their pieces. . . . I was in this place a fortnight and can say in sincerity that I never lay down to sleep a minute in all that time. . . .
The cannonade was severe, as well it might be, six sixty-four-gun ships, a thirty-six-gun frigate, a twenty-four-gun ship, a galley and a sloop of six guns, together with six batteries of six guns each and a bomb battery of three mortars, all playing at once upon our poor little fort, if fort it might be called. Some
of our officers endeavored to ascertain how many guns were fired in a minute by the enemy, but it was impossible, the fire was incessant. . . .
The enemy’s shot cut us up. I saw five artillerists belonging to one gun cut down by a single shot, and I saw men who were stooping to be protected by the works, but not stooping low enough, split like fish to be broiled. . . .
When the firing had in some measure subsided and I could look about me, I found the fort exhibited a picture of desolation. The whole area of the fort was as completely ploughed as a field. The buildings of every kind hanging in broken fragments, and the guns all dismounted, and how many of the garrison sent to the world of spirits, I knew not. If ever destruction was complete, it was here.
—Private Joseph Plumb Martin, the siege of Fort Mifflin7
Even at Bunker Hill, patriots had to brave bombardment from across the river in Boston and from men-of-war and gun batteries anchored offshore. All the firsthand accounts by patriots feature the terror caused by the enemy’s distant fire. The cannon shot “buzzed around us like hail†and “were incessantly whistling by us,†wrote John Chester.8 “From Boston and from the ships,†wrote Peter Brown, the British were “firing and throwing bombs, keeping us down till they got almost around us.†The “brisk†fire from distant weapons “caused some of our young country people to desert.â€9 William Prescott complained about the “very heavy cannonading and bombardment†and the “very warm fire from the enemy’s artillery,†which the patriots had to endure while working on their fortifications.10 “Our men were not used to cannon-balls,†William Tudor confessed to John Adams, “and they came so thick from the ships, floating batteries, &c., that they were discouraged from advancing.â€11
One of the most vivid accounts of the Battle of Bunker Hill comes from Issachar Bates, who had just enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen:
We had to take our full share of their hot metal—of Cannon Balls—Grape and Cannister shot— . . . I could see them great nasty porridge pots flying thro’ the air & cramed as full of Devils as they could hold, come whispering along with its blue tail in the day time, and its firey tail by night and if it burst in the air it would thro its hellish stuff all about ones ears, and if it fell to the ground it would hop about just as if the verry Devil was in it, until it bursted and then look out for shins and all above and at the same times cannon balls flying about once a minuit.12
Such was the terror of impersonal warfare. Deeply affected by “these wicked inventions of men to shed blood and bring destruction upon their fellow creatures,†Bates became a pacifist and later joined the Shaker sect. Many others of the Revolutionary generation, like Bates, detested the brutalities of war. Approximately eighty thousand people, one in every thirty free Americans, were members of pacifistic religious sects that opposed the taking of human life.13
All this killing-from-afar is left out of the traditional telling, with its emphasis on a more proximate style of warfare. Listening to accounts of those who were there places the Battle of Bunker Hill in a different perspective. Nearly all firsthand descriptions feature the heavy bombardment by British artillery. American soldiers did hold their fire until an appropriate time, and, in the end, a few who had not managed to escape did face hand-to-hand combat. But the notion that the patriots did not engage in battle until they could look the enemy in the eyes is not a fair or adequate characterization of the fighting, either at Bunker Hill in particular or in the American Revolution in general.
THE BATTLE OF BREED’S HILL
Here’s what happened at the so-called Battle of Bunker Hill. After a disastrous retreat from Concord on April 19, 1775, the British army garrisoned within Boston, a peninsula attached to the mainland only by a thin neck. A large array of colonial militias, quickly transformed into an actual army, surrounded the city and laid siege to the British Regulars within it. After a stalemate that lasted almost two months, colonial rebels received intelligence that the British were preparing to break out and take command of a promontory across the Charles River. American officers issued orders to construct fortifications on Bunker Hill, but the officers charged with executing these orders decided that Breed’s Hill would be easier to defend. This is how the Battle of Breed’s Hill became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Throughout the night of June 16, 1775, farmers-turned-soldiers worked the soil for military purposes; by dawn on June 17, they had constructed a redoubt “eight rods square.†All morning they continued to labor on a series of breastworks that would shield them during an attack, but once the British had spotted their fortifications, patriots had to brave an incessant cannonade while they worked. Approximately 1,500 patriots prepared to defend the position on Breed’s Hill against an attack of almost 3,000 British Regulars.
British ships fired not only on the patriots’ redoubts, but also on the nearby town of Charlestown, which they committed to flames. Issachar Bates described the conflagration: “And Oh! What a horrible sight, to stand and behold their hot balls, carcases and stink-pots flaming thro’ the air for the distance of more than a mile, and in less than an hour that beautiful town was all in flames!â€14
In the early afternoon, as patriot soldiers braced for the British advance, their officers fired commands like grapeshot. “Do not fire till you see the whites of their eyes,†or some variation thereof, was among these last-minute directives hurled at the farmers-turned-soldiers during this crash course on battlefield discipline.
At around three in the afternoon on June 17, a vanguard of British soldiers advanced up the hill. Most of the patriots held their fire as commanded; a few did not. (Later, one American officer stated that he had purposely shot early, hoping to induce premature and ineffectual fire from the enemy.15) When the British were close enough that musket fire might be reasonably effective—approximately sixty yards, according to contemporaneous reports—the patriots commenced their first volley. The deadly fire continued unabated, causing the Redcoats to retreat.
The British regrouped and charged the hill once again. This time the patriots held their fire until the enemy was only thirty yards away, still not close enough to gaze into the eyes of the soldiers who were trying to kill them. Since the second charge was not as concerted as the first, there was not as much danger of being overrun, so patriots could wait longer before discharging their muskets. Again the shots hit their marks, and again the British retreated.
Through heavy cannonading, however, the British were able to force the patriots to abandon their breastworks. When the Redcoats charged the third time, the weary and shell-shocked patriots decided to abandon the redoubt. They had not received the reinforcements they had expected. Most patriots were able to run; a few who could not leave the redoubt quickly enough were forced to deflect bayonets with the butt ends of their muskets. This was the only fighting in close quarters during the battle.
The retreat was itself fraught with hazard. Offshore batteries continued to pound away at the narrow Charlestown Neck, which the Americans were forced to cross. “I was not suffered to be touched,†wrote Peter Brown, “although I was in the fort when the enemy came in, and jumped over the walls, and ran a half a mile, where balls flew like hail-stones, and cannon roared like thunder.â€16
Technically, the British won the Battle of Bunker Hill, for they took new ground—but their victory came at a horrific cost: 226 killed and another 828 wounded, some of whom later perished. Most of these young men from poor families on the other side of the Atlantic were hit by bullets fired from muskets at midrange. Patriot losses were also significant: 140 killed and 271 wounded.17 Today, we celebrate this bloodbath with a quaint little story about “the whites of their eyes,†which demonstrates how valorous war can be.
THE “EYES†PREVAIL
How did the cru
de, impersonal slaughter at the Battle of Bunker Hill come to satisfy our yearning for a more intimate form of combat?
Contemporaneous accounts referred to Bunker Hill as a defeat for the Americans. Patriots, however, placed an interesting spin on this defeat. Soon after the battle, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety issued a report that claimed a moral victory: “Though the officers and soldiers of the ministerial army meanly exult in having gained this ground,†wrote the committee, “they cannot but attest to the bravery of our troops.†The carnage inflicted upon the British, it claimed, had “blasted†all previous records. “Such a slaughter was, perhaps, never before made upon British troops.â€18
Crucial to the positive spin placed on the defeat was the willingness of the rebels to hold their ground against thousands of disciplined Redcoats. Despite glistening bayonets pointed at them, the committee declared, the inexperienced American troops had not panicked. They had obeyed their officers’ orders to withhold fire. With ammunition scarce, no shots had been wasted. Not until the British “came within ten or twelve rods,†wrote the Committee of Safety, did the Americans commence their first volley; on the second charge, they waited till the enemy was “five or six rods†away. (One rod is 16.5 feet, so “ten or twelve rods†translates to 165 to 198 feet, or 55 to 66 yards, and “five or six rods†to 82.5 to 99 feet, or 27.5 to 33 yards.)19
Those numbers would figure prominently in the early histories of the Revolutionary War. William Gordon and David Ramsay repeated the Committee of Safety’s estimate verbatim. John Marshall stated more conservatively that the British had advanced “within less than one hundred yards†when the Americans opened fire.20 Virtually all the early accounts specified the distance that separated the opposing forces at the time of the first and second volleys, for this constituted proof that the patriots had both followed orders and displayed great courage in the face of the advancing Redcoats. But those distances, although varying somewhat from one account to the next, were always several times greater than five yards, the point at which the whites of the enemy’s eyes might first become visible in combat situations.