Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, has been showing me the way for more than fourteen years; thanks again, Stuart, for your friendship and guidance. Thanks also to his associates Shana Cohen and Ross Harris. Thanks to Meghan Walker of Tandem Literary for keeping me connected to my readers through my Web site and social media.

  Finally, a special thanks to my wife, Melissa, and to all our family members for your support and patience.

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  AAS—American Antiquarian Society

  AA4—American Archives, 4th series, edited by Peter Force

  BAR—The Beginnings of the American Revolution, edited by Ellen Chase

  CHS—Cambridge Historical Society

  CKG—The Correspondence of King George the Third, vol. 3, edited by John Fortescue

  DAR—Documents of the American Revolution, edited by K. G. Davies

  DJW—Dr. Joseph Warren, by Samuel Forman

  EIHC—Essex Institute Historical Collections

  FYAR—The First Year of the American Revolution, by Allen French

  HSOB—History of the Siege of Boston, by Richard Frothingham

  JEPC—The Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1774 and 1775, edited by William Lincoln

  LAR—Letters of the American Revolution, edited by Margaret Willard

  LJA—Letters of John Andrews

  LJW—The Life of Joseph Warren, by Richard Frothingham

  MHS—Massachusetts Historical Society

  NDAR—Naval Documents of the American Revolution, edited by William Bell Clark

  NEHGR—New England Historical and Genealogical Register

  NEQ—New England Quarterly

  NYPL—New York Public Library

  OPAR—Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, by Peter Oliver

  PGW—The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, edited by Philander Chase

  PIR—Province in Rebellion: A Documentary History of the Founding of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1774–1775, edited by L. Kinvin Wroth

  PNG—Papers of Nathanael Greene, vol. 1, edited by Richard Showman

  SHG—Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, by Clifford Shipton

  SSS—The Spirit of Seventy-Six, edited by Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris

  WMQ—William and Mary Quarterly

  An immense amount has been written about the American Revolution, especially as it relates to its beginnings in Boston, and I am indebted to all the authors and editors referred to in the notes and bibliography. Several late-breaking (and, in one instance, ongoing) additions to the scholarly canon have provided information and insights that would have not been available if I had attempted to write this book just a few years earlier. Samuel Forman in his biography Dr. Joseph Warren (2011) has brought a much-needed physician’s perspective to the life of his subject while unearthing all sorts of new connections and associations, particularly when it comes to Warren’s relationship with his fiancée, Mercy Scollay. Two books about the Battle of Bunker Hill, Paul Lockhardt’s The Whites of Their Eyes (2011) and James Nelson’s With Fire and Sword (2011), have provided different but complementary perspectives on the battle, while Nelson’s earlier publication George Washington’s Secret Navy (2008) helped put the maritime side of the story in a fresh context. Although the Boston Tea Party is only briefly touched on in what follows, Benjamin Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots (2010) arrived just in the nick of time, as did Ron Chernow’s monumental George Washington (2010), Vincent Carretta’s Phillis Wheatley (2011), Jack Rakove’s Revolutionaries (2010), T. H. Breen’s American Insurgents, American Patriots (2010), Neil Longley York’s Henry Hulton and the American Revolution (2010), and Ray Raphael’s Founders (2009), which expanded on the view originally presented in Raphael’s New England–specific The First American Revolution (2002). Most recently, the publication of J. L. Bell’s General George Washington’s Headquarters and Home—Cambridge, Massachusetts (2012) by the U.S. Park Service has given the story of the Siege of Boston a depth and scholarly rigor that had not previously existed. Bell’s blog Boston 1775 continues to provide an informative and highly entertaining window into the history and scholarship of revolutionary Boston.

  Two final points: First, I have adjusted the spelling and punctuation of quotations to make them more accessible to a modern audience—something that had already been done by the editors of several collections cited below. Second, even though provincial Boston was technically a town (since it was governed by a board of selectmen instead of a mayor), I refer to it on occasion as a city. Not only does this help to distinguish Boston from the much smaller towns in the province; it reflects the usage of those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom the term “city” applied to any community, large or small, as in John Winthrop’s biblically inspired reference to Boston as a “city on a hill.”

  Preface—The Decisive Day

  The description of John Quincy Adams’s response to the Battle of Bunker Hill is based primarily on the notes provided in Abigail Adams’s June 18, 1775, letter to her husband, in Adams Family Correspondence, edited by L. H. Butterfield, pp. 222–24. My thanks to Caroline Keinath at the Adams House National Historic Site in Quincy, Mass., for showing me the hill on which John Quincy Adams and his mother watched the battle. In a February 13, 1818, letter to Hezekiah Niles, John Adams writes, “But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations” (Works, 10:282–89). On the ways that interpersonal relationships determined political beliefs, see the quotation from Henry Laurens cited by Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution in which Laurens claimed that personal animosities “did more to make him a patriot . . . than all the whig pamphlets he might have read” (p. 63); Wood also cites the claim by a Philadelphian that he had known “every person, white and black, men, women, and children in the city of Philadelphia by name,” even though that city was considerably larger than Boston (p. 59). John Adams claimed that only about a third of the population was dedicated to the patriot cause at the beginning of the Revolution in an August 1813 letter to Thomas McKean (Works, 10:63); according to Robert Calhoon (“Loyalism and Neutrality,” in A Companion to the American Revolution, edited by Jack Greene and J. R. Pole, p. 235), about 20 percent of the colonists were loyalists, with at least half the population wanting to avoid a conflict altogether and with the patriots gaining the support of between 40 and 45 percent of the population. Walter McDougall in Freedom Just Around the Corner writes that the American colonists were the “least taxed people on earth” and also enjoyed the “highest per capita standard of living of any people on earth” (pp. 118, 123). Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation was first published in Bangkok in 1993 by the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Burma; since then it’s been translated into thirtyone languages and counting; it’s now in its fourth U.S. edition and is published, perhaps suitably given the city’s revolutionary history, in East Boston by the Albert Einstein Institution. See Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution,” New York Times, February 16, 2011.

  Chapter One—The City on the Hill

  My description of Josiah Quincy Jr.’s speech in Old South Meetinghouse on December 16, 1773, is based primarily on Josiah Quincy’s Memoir of Josiah Quincy, which cites Daniel Greenleaf’s memory of Quincy’s dramatic words (pp. 124–25); Greenleaf had been a student of the Lovells at Boston Latin School and was in the gallery that day. Edward Randolph’s letter to King Charles II concerning the claims made by Massachusetts governor Leverett is cited in Michael Hall’s Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, pp. 24–25. Leverett’s bloody leather battle jacket is at the M
HS. On the aftereffects of King Philip’s War, see my Mayflower, pp. 345–46, and Stephen Saunders Webb’s 1676: The End of American Independence, pp. 409–16. On the overthrow and jailing of Governor Edmund Andros, see G. B. Warden’s Boston, 1689–1776, pp. 3–14. On the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg, see J. Revell Carr’s Seeds of Discontent: The Deep Roots of the American Revolution, 1650–1750, pp. 186–262.

  On Britain’s economic policies during the first half of the eighteenth century, see James Henretta’s “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration Under the Duke of Newcastle, pp. 323–25, 344. On the debt generated by the end of the French and Indian War, see Alvin Rabushka’s Taxation in Colonial America, pp. 568–69. L. Kinvin Wroth describes the trade patterns and other economic activities of Massachusetts in the mid-1700s in an interpretive essay in Province in Rebellion (PIR), 1:1–3. My thanks to former British consul general in Boston Philip Budden for pointing out the Puritan roots of the slogan “No taxation without representation,” in a private correspondence. Oliver Dickerson analyzes the effects of the various acts in The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution; according to Dickerson, the customs officers were “paid out of the revenue collected” (p. 203). Ray Raphael provides a good synopsis of James Otis’s arguments on the writs of assistance in Founders, pp. 13–17. On the details of what happened in the Boston Massacre, see Hiller Zobel’s The Boston Massacre, pp. 180–205, and Richard Archer’s As if an Enemy’s Country, pp. 182–206. John Greenwood writes of the comet and the fears of an apocalypse in The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood, pp. 3–4. The comet that appeared in the night sky over New England during the summer of 1773 was much commented on at the time and is now known as Lexell’s Comet (for Anders Johan Lexell, who computed its orbit); modern-day astronomers have estimated that Lexell’s Comet passed closer to Earth than any other comet in recorded history.

  John Tyler’s Smugglers and Patriots is an excellent examination of the complex role merchants played in the controversies leading up to the Revolution, particularly when it came to the impact Dutch smugglers had on the Boston Tea Party (pp. 171–210). My account of the Tea Party depends largely on Benjamin Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots, pp. 118–40, and Benjamin Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party, pp. 140–45. According to Edward Byers in Nation of Nantucket, whale oil exports constituted almost 53 percent of all pounds sterling earned by New England’s exports to Great Britain in the years prior to the Revolution (p. 144). On Hancock’s attempts to corner the whale oil market, see Eric Jay Dolin’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, pp. 132–35; see also W. T. Baxter’s The House of Hancock, especially pp. 243–46, on Hancock’s final disastrous 1766 campaign to corner the market, which resulted in the loss of 3,600 pounds sterling and effectively ended Hancock’s attempts to compete with the Nantucketers. Also adding to the anti-Nantucket feeling among the Boston patriots was the fact that one of the leading customs officials in Boston, Nathaniel Coffin Sr., came from a family with deep island connections, a point made by James Grieder in “The Boston Tea Party Unmasked: Nantucket’s Real Role in the Start of the American Revolution,” Historic Nantucket, vol. 62, no. 1, p. 12.

  Joyce Junior’s broadsides and other announcements appeared in the January 17 and 31, March 28, and April 4, 1774, issues of the Boston Gazette; an advertisement for John Winthrop Junior’s latest shipment of “Baltimore Flour” also appears in the April 4 issue. My description of Joyce Junior’s back history is based in part on two articles by Albert Matthews, “Joyce Junior” and “Joyce Junior Once More.” The identity of Joyce was revealed by a loyalist commentator in a listing of various patriot leaders from 1775 in the James Bowdoin papers at the MHS; see MHS Proceedings, 2nd ser., 12 (1897–8): 139–42. A physical description of Joyce Junior appeared in the November 9, 1821, Boston Daily Advertiser: “A man used to ride on an ass, with immense jack boots, and his face covered with a horrible mask, and was called Joyce, Jr. His office was to assemble men and boys in mob style, and ride in the middle of them, and in such company to terrify adherents to royal government, before the Revolution. The tumults which resulted in the massacre, 1770, was excited by such means. Joyce Junior was said to have a particular whistle, which brought his adherents, etc. whenever they were wanted.” Esther Forbes writes insightfully about the hazy genealogy of Joyce Junior and its connection to Pope Night in Paul Revere, pp. 96, 127, 189, 211, 326–29, 471–72. On Pope Night, see J. L. Bell, “Du Simitiere’s Sketches of Pope Day in Boston 1767.” Alfred Young describes Joyce Junior as “an all-powerful figure who would mobilize the people against their enemies but would not countenance mob action,” in the chapter “Tar and Feathers and the Ghost of Oliver Cromwell,” in Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution, p. 164; elsewhere Young speaks of the “conservative backlash” that followed the Tea Party in the spring of 1774, p. 121. A version of Joyce Junior appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” On John Winthrop Jr. see Clifford Shipton’s biographical essay in SHG, 16:294–95.

  My account of Boston in 1774 is based largely on Nathaniel Shurtleff, A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston; Shurtleff refers to the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story collection, Legends of Province House, that talks about how the Indian atop Province House appeared to be aiming at the weathercock of the Old South Meetinghouse, p. 601; see also Walter Muir Whitehill’s Boston: A Topographical History. On the Liberty Tree at the corner of Essex and Newbury streets, see Arthur Schlesinger, “The Liberty Tree: A Genealogy.” Richard Frothingham in History of the Siege of Boston (HSOB) writes of the flagstaff that rose out of the top of the Liberty Tree, p. 27. See Deacon Tudor’s Diary for an account of the deep snow in Boston in late January; on January 31 he wrote: “Still cold, fine sledding for 200 miles to the westward as travelers tell us and snow in general 3 feet deep. This January for the most part has been very cold” (p. 45). My description of the tarring and feathering of John Malcom is based largely on Frank Hersey’s “Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom,” which reprints accounts of the incident that appeared in Boston newspapers, as well as Benjamin Irvin’s “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776” and Walter Watkins’s “Tarring and Feathering in Boston in 1770.” In old age, George Hewes provided two accounts of his encounter with John Malcom, first in James Hawkes, A Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party, pp. 33–35, and then in Benjamin Thatcher, Traits of the Tea Party, pp. 127–34. See also Alfred Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, pp. 46–51.

  Benjamin Carp writes about the relationship between colonial firefighters and the patriot cause in “Fire of Liberty: Firefighters, Urban Voluntary Culture and the Revolutionary Movement,” pp. 781–818. On January 20, 1766, John Adams recorded in his diary Daniel Leonard’s comments on the destruction of Thomas Hutchinson’s house: “Thought Hutchinson’s History did not shine. Said his house was pulled down, to prevent his writing any more by destroying his materials” (1:300). According to Pauline Maier in “Revolutionary Violence and the Relevance of History,” “Mobs were too easily transformed into corporate organs of their communities to be considered explosive repositories of dissent. The rioters of one night might serve the next evening as posse, military company or . . . fire company” (p. 131). See also Maier’s “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth Century America” and her seminal From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776. On William Russell, see Francis Drake, Tea Leaves, p. 159. According to an account that received wide distribution in England in the fall of 1774, Malcom was forced by the crowd to toast the king and his family and drink a large amount of tea, which was ultimately forced down his throat with a funnel—an anecdote that inspired a well-known engraving. However, none of the Boston newspapers makes any mention of the tea-drinking episode, and even more significantly, Malcom himself never refers to it in his own detailed account of his sufferings, in which he is
careful to enumerate all the outrages committed by the Bostonians. I have, therefore, chosen not to include the tea-drinking episode in my account of Malcom’s tarring and feathering. See R. T. H. Halsey, The Boston Port Bill as Pictured by a Contemporary London Cartoonist, pp. 82–86, 93, for both the engraving and the newspaper accounts. The story of John Malcom’s patriot brother Daniel is told in George Wolkins’s “Daniel Malcom and Writs of Assistance.” In a January 31, 1774, letter, the loyalist Ann Hulton writes in detail about the tarring and feathering of John Malcom and reports, “The doctors say that it is impossible this poor creature can live. They say his flesh comes off his back in steaks.” Letters of a Loyalist Lady, p. 71.

  John Singleton Copley’s April 26, 1774, letter to Isaac Clarke telling of how he was threatened with a visit from Joyce Junior is in Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, p. 218. Jules David Prown in John Singleton Copley in American Art writes of the “stunning immediacy” of Copley’s portraits and the “sense of presence, of the physical entity and personality of the sitter, which is conveyed across the span of 200 years. The subject of the portrait appears as a distinct, knowable human being” (p. 53). The statistic that one in five Boston families owned slaves in the second quarter of the eighteenth century comes from Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 51. An advertisement for Phillis Wheatley’s new book of poems appears in the January 24, 1774, issue of the Boston Gazette. On Wheatley and how she had become a “political hot potato,” see David Waldstreicher, “The Wheatleyan Moment,” pp. 540–41. Her February 11, 1774, letter to Samson Occom is reprinted in William H. Robinson’s Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, p. 332. See also Vincent Carretta’s Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, pp. 159–60. Abner Goodell writes about the execution and gibbeting of Mark in “The Trial and Execution . . . of Mark and Phillis,” pp. 28–30. In his account of his famous ride, Paul Revere refers to the place “where Mark was hung in chains,” in “A Letter from Col. Paul Revere to the Corresponding Secretary,” p. 107. On the advertisements for slaves in Boston newspapers, see Robert Desrochers Jr.’s “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781.” On the legislative attempts to end slavery in colonial Massachusetts, see George Moore’s Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts, especially pp. 138–40, and “Negro Petitions for Freedom,” pp. 432–37. F. Nwabueze Okoye writes passionately about the reality of slavery in American colonial society in “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries.” The October 31, 1768, petition signed by John Hancock and John Rowe accusing a British officer of inciting Boston’s slaves to revolt is in Boston Under Military Rule, 1768–1769, edited by Oliver Morton Dickerson, p. 16.