Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  It was not for him to spout purple platitudes about men like Joseph Warren who had died so that they could all be free. It was up to him, who as a seven-year-old boy had watched and wept beside his thirty-year-old mother, to continue what the doctor had helped to begin.

  “My life must be militant to its close,” he wrote, and on that evening in June 1843, as he turned to walk back to the home he had inherited from his father, he was still spoiling for a fight.

  Three views of Boston drawn in 1764, the year before the passage of the Stamp Act.

  Looking north from Boston’s Beacon Hill across the many ropewalks at Barton’s Point, with Charlestown beyond.

  Looking south from Beacon Hill across Boston Common and the Back Bay, with Boston Neck curving to the right toward Roxbury.

  Looking north from Long Wharf toward Boston’s North End.

  The cross-eyed Josiah Quincy Jr., the most articulate lawyer in Boston and a passionate patriot, died of tuberculosis before he could report on the results of a diplomatic mission to London during the winter of 1775. This portrait was painted posthumously by Gilbert Stuart.

  (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  Some of the forceful intensity that made Samuel Adams such an effective revolutionary leader is evident in this portrait painted by John Singleton Copley soon after the Boston Massacre.

  (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  Sometimes referred to as “King Hancock,” John Hancock had the highest public profile among Boston’s patriots. This portrait was painted by Copley circa 1770–1772.

  The Reverend Samuel Cooper led Boston’s most affluent congregation at the Brattle Street Meeting; he was also one of Boston’s leading patriots and maintained a correspondence with Benjamin Franklin in London.

  King George III in 1771, four years before the eruption of violence at Lexington and Concord.

  In 1771, John Singleton Copley traveled to New York, where he painted this portrait of General Thomas Gage, future royal governor of Massachusetts.

  Margaret Gage’s much-commented-on beauty is evident in this portrait by Copley, which the artist considered one of his finest.

  Joseph Warren, dressed in the traditional black of a physician, leans on an anatomical drawing in this portrait painted by Copley in the mid-1760s.

  (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  A Lady in a Blue Dress was painted by Copley in the early 1760s and may depict Joseph Warren’s future fiancée, Mercy Scollay.

  The silversmith Paul Revere, painted by Copley in 1768, the year British troops first arrived at Long Wharf.

  (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  The Green Dragon Tavern in Boston’s North End was the home of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge and an important center of patriot activities in the 1770s.

  Captain John Montresor was the highly skilled British engineer who oversaw the construction of the many defensive works around Boston and on the Charlestown peninsula during the siege.

  The fighting at Lexington Green, the first in a series of four engravings issued by Amos Doolittle in 1775 based on interviews with eyewitnesses and careful study of the terrain.

  The newly arrived British officers Colonel Francis Smith and Major John Pitcairn stand on the hill overlooking the town of Concord, studying the militiamen on Punkatasset Hill to the north.

  Militiamen and British regulars collide at the North Bridge in Concord.

  The flag that militiamen from the town of Bedford reputedly flew during the fighting at the North Bridge.

  The fighting along the road from Lexington to Charlestown.

  Some claimed that if Captain Timothy Pickering of Salem had shown the proper spirit, he and his militia company might have cut off General Percy’s British regulars before they reached Charlestown.

  Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury was forty-seven and suffering from an attack of kidney stones when he took command of the provincial forces after the fighting at Lexington and Concord.

  John Trumbull’s Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill. When Abigail Adams first saw this painting in 1786, she claimed that “my blood shivered.”

  (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  Abigail Adams, circa 1766, ten years before she witnessed the reading of the Declaration of Independence at the State House in Boston.

  Charles Willson Peale painted this portrait of George Washington around 1780. According to one observer, “There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chamber by his side.”

  Despite having been raised as a Quaker, the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene quickly distinguished himself as one of Washington’s most promising young generals. This portrait was painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1783.

  By successfully transporting sixty tons of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge (a journey of three hundred miles), Henry Knox justified his appointment to colonel of the Continental Army’s troubled artillery regiment.

  The British officer J. F. W. Des Barres made this sketch of the British lines at Boston Neck in 1775.

  A view of Boston from Willis Creek in Cambridge by Des Barres.

  Another Des Barres sketch, showing the islands of Boston Harbor from the city’s Fort Hill.

  Boston from Dorchester Heights by Des Barres.

  The minister Mather Byles was an unrepentant loyalist who chose to remain in Boston after the evacuation of the British. A noted punster, he called the soldier who was ordered to guard him his “observe-a-Tory.”

  The immense crowd that gathered on June 17, 1843, to celebrate the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument.

  Paul Revere’s 1768 depiction of the arrival of British troops at Long Wharf, the event that ultimately led, a year and a half later, to the Boston Massacre.

  An engraving of Boston Common based on a 1768 watercolor by Christian Remick. The tents of the newly arrived British regulars are bracketed by the elm-lined Mall below and John Hancock’s mansion above.

  An 1801 depiction of the Old State House, known as the Town House in pre-revolutionary Boston and the seat of the province’s General Court.

  The Old South Meeting on the corner of Milk and Marlborough streets, where as many as five thousand people gathered prior to the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773.

  Province House, the official residence of the colony’s governor, originally built in 1679 by Peter Sargent.

  The copper weathervane atop Province House depicting an Indian archer. It was crafted by Shem Drowne and probably based on Massachusetts’s colonial seal.

  Two wagons from Pope Night, Boston’s version of Guy Fawkes Day, the November 5 celebration during which rival gangs from the North and South Ends battled for supremacy. Included in this 1767 sketch by the Swiss artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière are caricatures of the devil and the pope.

  The tarring and feathering of John Malcom in 1774 as depicted by the British artist Philip Dawe. The patriots are pouring tea down Malcom’s throat as a noose dangles menacingly from the branch of the Liberty Tree.

  During the winter of 1774, the poet Phillis Wheatley described the patriots’ insistence on liberty and their tolerance of African American slavery as a “strange absurdity.”

  Fanueil Hall, where Boston town meetings were traditionally held, was described by the patriot Thomas Young as a “noble school” of democracy.

  The home of Dr. Joseph Warren on Hanover Street; it was from this house that Warren dispatched Paul Revere to alert the countryside that British regulars were on their way to Concord.

  A satirical cartoon of Charles Lee, the eccentric British officer whose admiration for the patriot cause was almost as strong as his love for his Pomeranian dog, Spado.

  Israel Putnam, known as “Old Put,” was a hero of the French and Indian War who played a prominent if co
ntroversial role in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

  Lord Percy was the young, impeccably bred British officer who led the mission to rescue Colonel Francis Smith’s regulars as they fought their way back to Boston from Concord.

  Thomas Flucker was the provincial secretary of Massachusetts; his daughter Lucy married the patriot bookseller Henry Knox, who reported that his loyalist father-in-law was in possession of information that could only have been communicated by a British spy.

  Benjamin Church, the famous Indian fighter whose 1716 narrative of King Philip’s War was reissued in the 1770s. This engraving by Paul Revere, who was a patriot colleague of Church’s great-grandson, Dr. Benjamin Church, may bear a distinct resemblence to the controversial doctor, who proved to be a British spy.

  Francis Smith in 1764, eleven years before he led the British regulars to Lexington and Concord.

  William Heath was the only provincial general on the scene during the British retreat from Lexington to Charlestown in April 1775. During the Siege of Boston, he vehemently opposed Washington’s plans to invade Boston.

  General John Thomas was a physician from Kingston, Massachusetts, who commanded the American forces in Roxbury.

  William Howe had a reputation as a master tactician in the British army; he was to meet his match at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

  Henry Clinton’s considerable strategic abilities were marred by a nervous, often irascible temperament; he was, he admitted in a letter to a friend, “a shy bitch.”

  John Burgoyne bragged about making “elbow room” for the British forces trapped in Boston; they were words he came to regret.

  Dr. John Jeffries claimed that Joseph Warren offered him a position as the head of the provincial army’s medical corps, despite the fact that Jeffries was a self-proclaimed loyalist. After the Battle of Bunker Hill, he would identify Warren’s corpse.

  Bostonians watch the Battle of Bunker Hill from the city’s rooftops in an engraving by Howard Pyle.

  The British regulars storm the redoubt on Breed’s Hill in a panel from a modern cyclorama by the artist Leonard Kowalsky.

  A 1775 satirical cartoon depicting the sufferings of a British regular during the Siege of Boston. As the drawing points out, the average soldier fighting in America was paid less than a chimney sweep back in London.

  A 1776 British cartoon mocking the American soldiers who manned the entrenchments during the Siege of Boston. Each one wears a cap that reads “Death or Liberty.”

  The discovery of this coded letter in September 1775 revealed Dr. Benjamin Church, head of the provincial army’s medical department, to be a British spy.

  General Howe supervises the evacuation of Boston in March 1776.

  A sketch by the British engineer Archibald Robertson of the burning of Castle William.

  John Quincy Adams in 1843, the same year that the Bunker Hill Monument was completed. Adams was haunted by his memories of the battle he’d watched as a seven-year-old boy.

  Acknowledgments

  Researcher and friend Michael Hill has been an immense help during the three years it took to write this book. I am indebted to the descendants of two historical personages who figure large in this narrative: Lord Nicholas Gage, who spoke with me over a glass of sherry at his ancestral home of Firle in Sussex, England, and Paul Revere Jr., with whom I had lunch at Spanky’s Clam Shack in Hyannis, Massachusetts. My thanks to Robert Pasley-Tyler in London and John Ross on Cape Cod for making the interviews possible. Thanks to writer Adam Nicolson for his insights into the British gentry. Peter Drummey at the Massachusetts Historical Society was extremely generous with his time and expertise; it was Peter who first told me that Dr. Samuel Forman was at work on a biography of Dr. Joseph Warren, and I have benefited greatly from Dr. Forman’s recently published book and the correspondence we have conducted over the course of several months. J. L. Bell’s blog Boston 1775 has been a daily source of inspiration and research advice. Special thanks to Victor Mastone of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, Craig Brown of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and Christopher Maio of the Department of Earth, Environmental and Ocean Sciences of the University of Massachusetts at Boston for sharing the results of their research into the Battle of Chelsea Creek and for the tour of East Boston. Ever since as editor of the New England Quarterly he published my first article of history, Professor William Fowler has provided me with essential advice and encouragement; many thanks, Bill, for all your help. Professor Paul Lockhardt’s writings about the Revolution include an important book about the Battle of Bunker Hill; many thanks, Paul, for your input. Former British Consul General of Boston Philip Budden helped me appreciate the British perspective on the events described in this book. Judge Hiller Zobel, author of the still-definitive Boston Massacre (1970), is, in addition to being a noted legal scholar and colonial historian, a master of the English language; thanks, Hiller, for making this a better book. William Gow Harrington spent many hours on my behalf at the Dedham Historical Society; his father, Peter Gow, has been reading my manuscripts for more than twenty-five years; thanks, Peter and Will. Elizabeth Mansfield provided a seemingly endless supply of research leads. Thanks to Emily Stover, Carolyn Paris, and Penny Scheerer, who accompanied my wife, Melissa, and me on a research sail to Statia, the Caribbean island from which revolutionary New Englanders secured Dutch tea and gunpowder; Penny (distantly related to militiaman Nathaniel Page of Bedford, Massachusetts) also directed me to information concerning the famous Bedford flag. Special thanks to Erik Goldstein, curator of Mechanical Arts and Numismatics at Colonial Williamsburg, for his late-inning input; thanks to Gregory Whitehead for asking the right questions.

  I also want to thank Caroline Keinath at the Adams National Historic Site in Quincy, Massachusetts; Elizabeth Watts Pope at the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts; the staffs of the many sites of the Boston National Historical Park, but especially Sean Hennessey and Marty Blatt at the Charlestown Navy Yard; Richard Spiver and Richard Tourangeau at the Bunker Hill Monument and Museum; and William Barlow for his “tower tour” of historic Boston. Thanks also to Brian Lemay, Elizabeth Roscio, Nathaniel Sheidley, and Marieke Van Damme at the Bostonian Society; to Peter Harrington at the Brown University Library; and to Leslie Tobias-Olsen at the John Carter Brown Library, both in Providence, Rhode Island; to Gavin W. Kleespies at the Cambridge Historical Society; to Barbara DeWolfe, Brian Dunnigan, Clayton Lewis, and Janet Bloom at the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan; to Andre Ashby of the Independence National Historic Site in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; to the staffs of the many sites operated by the Lexington Historical Society; to Peter Drummey, Anne Bentley, Anna Cook, and Liz Francis at the Massachusetts Historical Society; to the staffs of the sites associated with Minute Man National Park in Concord, Massachusetts; to Tal Nadan and Thomas Lannon at the New York Public Library; to Jane Hennedy and Andrew Boisvert of the Old Colony Historical Society in Taunton, Massachusetts; to the staffs of the Old North Church and of the Paul Revere House, both in Boston; to the staff of the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts; to the staff of the Jason Russell House in Arlington, Massachusetts; to Emily Curran at the Old South Meetinghouse; and to James Shea, Anita Israel, and David Daly at Washington’s Headquarters/Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  For reading and commenting on the manuscript I am indebted to J. L. Bell, Philip Budden, Dr. Samuel Forman, William Fowler, Erik Goldstein, Peter Gow, Michael Hill, Paul Lockhardt, Jennifer Philbrick McArdle, Bruce Miller, Melissa D. Philbrick, Marianne Philbrick, Samuel Philbrick, Thomas Philbrick, Gregory Whitehead, and Hiller Zobel. All errors of fact and interpretation are mine and mine alone.

  At Viking Penguin, I have been privileged to work, once again, with the incomparable Wendy Wolf. Thanks also to Clare Ferraro, Nancy Sheppard, Margaret Riggs, Francesca Belanger, Katherine Griggs, James T
ierney, Andrew Duncan, Louise Braverman, Meghan Fallon, and Carolyn Coleburn. Thanks to Miranda Ottewell for the copyediting and to Margaret Moore Booker for the index. Thanks also to Jeffrey Ward for the maps.