Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In an October 25, 1775, entry in his journal, Jeremy Belknap records various accounts he’d heard of events in Boston on the evening of April 18, including the appearance of a light infantryman in a shop and the conversation between two officers on Long Wharf (pp. 84–86). Ellen Chase includes this evidence as well as Samuel Drake’s account of the man who spoke with the groomer in the stables of Province House, along with an account of the officers dispatched to guard the roads to Concord, in BAR, 2:320–31. The essential illegality of Warren’s decision to send out the alarm on the night of April 18, 1775, is discussed by John Scheide in “The Lexington Alarm,” pp. 59–61; by John Cary in Joseph Warren, p. 183; and by Clifford Shipton in his biography of Warren in SHG, 14:520–21. Seemingly in his own defense, Warren writes Joseph Reed on May 15, 1775: “I verily believe that the night preceding the barbarous outrages committed by the soldiery in Lexington, Concord, etc. there were not 50 people in the whole colony that ever expected any blood would be shed in the contest between us and Great Britain” (LJW, p. 486). This statement appears to be at complete odds with what Warren knew to be the truth, especially since as recently as April 3, 1775, he had written to Arthur Lee that if Percy’s March 30 foray into the countryside had resulted in the destruction of any military stores “not a man of them [Percy’s brigade] would have returned to Boston” (LJW, p. 448). “Was he,” as Clifford Shipton so rightly asks concerning Warren’s decision to send out the alarm, “deliberately creating an incident which would assure war?” (p. 521). We’ll never know for sure, especially since, according to some accounts, many of Warren’s papers were destroyed after his death. Did these papers include incriminating documents that might have indicated just how deliberate Warren’s decision to send out the alarm really was? Once again, we’ll probably never know for sure.

  William Munroe describes Paul Revere’s arrival at the Jonas Clarke house on the night of April 18 in an affidavit recorded on March 7, 1825, in Elias Phinney’s History of the Battle of Lexington (subsequently referred to as Phinney), p. 33; Phinney provides the detail about Hancock responding, “Come in, Revere. We are not afraid of you” (p. 17). William Gordon appears to have spoken in great detail with Samuel Adams about the night of April 18 and morning of April 19; in his History of the American Revolution, vol. 1, he records, “Mr. Adams inferred from the number [of British regulars] to be employed that [the stores in Concord] were the objects, and not himself and Mr. Hancock, who might be more easily seized in a private way by a few armed individuals, than by a large body of troops that must march, for miles together, under the eye of the public” (pp. 476–77). Probably the best way to visualize Lexington Common or Green (both terms were used in eighteenth-century accounts) in 1775 is by looking at the relevant engraving in the series by Amos Doolittle, all of which are based on sketches made at the sites within weeks of the events in 1775. My description of John Parker is based on Elizabeth Parker’s “John Parker,” pp. 47, 60–61, and BAR, 2:345–46. Lexington militia company clerk Daniel Harrington reported that 130 militiamen answered the first call that night in William Gordon’s “Account of the Commencement of Hostilities” in AA4, 2:627. The number of Munroes, Harringtons, Smiths, Reeds, and Tidds on the Lexington militia rolls is in BAR, 2:380.

  As explained in Mary Babson Fuhrer’s “The Revolutionary Worlds of Lexington and Concord Compared,” Lexington had not experienced the divisions that had plagued Concord primarily because it was a younger town and had a history of strong and open-minded ministers. Fuhrer writes of how liberty in the eighteenth century had an entirely different meaning than it would have in the nineteenth century, citing the example of John Parker’s abolitionist grandson Theodore Parker, who believed “that liberty is an inalienable right of personhood, not as his forefathers had believed, of property” (p. 118). Levi Preston was the militiaman who said, “We always had been free, and we meant to be free always”; Mellen Chamberlain, “Why Captain Preston Fought,” pp. 68–70, and cited in BAR, 3:56, and David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, p. 164. For information on Prince Estabrook, see George Quintal’s Patriots of Color, pp. 97–98; also present on the Lexington Common that morning were two more “men of color,” Eli Burdoo and Silas Burdoo (pp. 69–71). The reference to the coercive tactics of the patriots (“everyone bends”) was made by General Frederick Haldimand, second in command to Gage in Boston; in Allen French’s “General Haldimand in Boston,” pp. 90–91. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie writes in his Diary of how the militiamen frequently called out “King Hancock forever” during the British retreat to Boston that day (p. 57). On November 21, 1822, William Sumner recorded Dorothy Quincy’s memories of the morning of April 19 in the Clarke parsonage, which included Adams’s insistence that “we belong to the cabinet” (“Reminiscences by Gen. William H. Sumner,” p. 187).

  David Hackett Fischer provides an excellent description of the uniforms and equipment of the British grenadiers and light infantrymen in Paul Revere’s Ride, pp. 118–23. According to Samuel Abbot Smith, West Cambridge 1775, a townsman from Menotomy was awakened that night “by the rattle of the pewter plates on his dresser, jarred, as they were, by the measured tramp of the soldiers” (p. 17); Smith also relates Deacon Ephraim Cutter’s account of how he heard later in the day “the measured tread of the soldiers as of one man” (pp. 26–27). According to Frank Coburn in The Battle of April 19, 1775, “the moon was shining sufficiently bright” for the soldiers to read signs along the road; Coburn also recounts how Mrs. Timothy Tufts looked out her window in Cambridge’s Beech Street and “saw from her bed the gun-barrels shining in the moonlight” (pp. 48–50), and how the widow Rand and her bullet-casting neighbor saw the soldiers’ footprints in the dirt of the road through Cambridge (p. 49). Lieutenant Jeremy Lister writes of how “the country people began to fire their alarm guns, light their beacons” as the regulars marched out of Menotomy in Vincent Kehoe, We Were There! (subsequently referred to as Kehoe), p. 115. Lieutenant Sutherland writes of hearing “several shots being fired . . . between 3 and 4 in the morning (a very unusual time for firing)” in Kehoe, p. 140. Colonel Smith’s account of how they “found the country had intelligence or strong suspicion of our coming, and fired many signal guns, and rung the alarm bells repeatedly” is also in Kehoe, p. 73. Samuel Abbot Smith relates how the Committee of Safety members fled the Black Horse Tavern in West Cambridge 1775, pp. 16–17.

  My description of the approach of the British advance guard to Lexington Common is based, in large part, on the accounts of Sutherland, Smith, Pope, Pitcairn, and Marr, all of which are in Kehoe (pp. 73, 76, 110, 138–89, and 155). BAR, vol. 2, contains descriptions of the capture of Porter, Richardson, and Wellington (pp. 360–61). Paul Revere writes in detail of his conversation with Major Mitchell and his officers in “A Letter . . . to the Corresponding Secretary,” p. 109. For a description of the dress and training of the provincial militiamen, see David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride, pp. 149–62; Doolittle’s engravings clearly indicate the differences in dress between the militiamen and the regulars. William Munroe testified to seeing two hundred cartridge papers lying on the ground in Phinney, p. 34. According to Reverend Jonas Clarke, A Brief Narrative, “After all this precaution, we had no notice of [the regulars’] approach, till the brigade was actually in the town” (p. 4). Paul Revere recounts overhearing John Parker’s order to “let the troops pass by and don’t molest them, without they being first,” in a deposition taken April 24, 1775, in Paul Revere’s Three Accounts of his Ride, p. 22. Robert Douglass’s account of hearing a militiaman say, “There are so few of us, it would be folly to stand here” (to which Parker replied, “The first man who offers to run shall be shot down”), is in Ezra Ripley’s A History of the Fight at Concord, p. 52. John Robbins’s testimony that one of the British officers cried out, “Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels,” is in A Narrative of the Excursion and Ravages of the King’s Troops, p. 8. Ezra Stiles records a secondhand description of Major
Pitcairn’s activities at Lexington, in which Stiles recounts how Pitcairn “struck his . . . sword downwards with all earnestness as the signal to forbear or cease firing,” in his Diary, 1:604–5. Paul Revere describes “a continual roar of musketry,” in “A Letter . . . to the Corresponding Secretary” (p. 110). The testimonies of John and Ebenezer Monroe concerning what happened that morning, including how Joshua Simons was prepared to blow up the open cask of powder in the attic of the Lexington Meetinghouse with his gun, are in Phinney, pp. 35–37. The death of Jonathan Harrington is recounted in BAR, 2:370. In an October 8, 1775, letter to R. Donkin, Colonel Smith writes of how he prevented the regulars from attacking the provincials inside the buildings on Lexington Common, in Kehoe, pp. 75, 141–42. Lieutenant Barker writes in his Diary that the light infantrymen “were so wild they could hear no orders” (p. 32).

  John Galvin discusses the problems created by Gage’s decision to go with a “motley mixture of units”—specifically “a loose command structure” that required company commanders “to operate with new procedures under unfamiliar leaders”—in The Minute Men, p. 103. Lieutenant Mackenzie in his Diary tells how Colonel Smith’s officers tried to convince him “to give up the idea of prosecuting his march and to return to Boston” (p. 63). William Heath’s criticism of the Lexington militia is in his Memoirs, p. 6. Harold Murdock in The Nineteenth of April 1775 argues that Samuel Adams must have been the one pulling the strings at Lexington that morning (pp. 23–25), as does Arthur Bernon Tourtellot in Lexington and Concord (originally titled William Diamond’s Drum), 79, 112, 125–27. But as the testimony of William Munroe makes clear (in which he recounts Hancock’s insistence that “if I had my musket, I would never turn my back upon these troops”), it was Hancock they were listening to (Phinney, p. 34). See J. L. Bell’s May 19, 2008, entry, “Who Really Wanted to Fight at Lexington?” in his blog Boston 1775, http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2008/05/who-really-wanted-to-fight-at-lexington.html, for a balanced assessment of Adams’s and Hancock’s influence (if any) on what happened at Lexington Green. William Gordon recounts the exchange between Samuel Adams and John Hancock, in which Adams describes the day as “glorious,” in his History, 1:478–79. Hancock’s description of the Lexington militia being only “partially provided with arms, and those they had were in most miserable order” is in “Reminiscences by Gen. William Sumner,” p. 187.

  Chapter Seven—The Bridge

  Mary Hartwell’s account of the regulars passing her house on the way to Concord is in A. E. Brown’s Beneath Old Roof Trees, p. 221. Colonel Smith writes of how his column marched “with as much good order as ever troops observed in Britain or any friendly country,” in his October 8, 1775, letter to R. Donkin, cited in Vincent Kehoe, We Were There! p. 75. Thaddeus Blood’s account of the Concord fight is in the Boston Daily Advertiser, April 20, 1886 (subsequently referred to as his Narrative). D. Michael Ryan in Concord and the Dawn of Revolution cites an article in the July 16, 1888, Boston Transcript that tells of an Emerson family tradition that “an English banner with ‘Union and Liberty’ inscribed in white letters” flew from the Concord liberty pole (p. 71). Lemuel Shattuck in A History of Concord quotes Reverend Emerson as saying, “Let us stand our ground” (pp. 105–6). Ezra Ripley in A History of the Fight at Concord describes how Colonel Barrett ordered the provincials to march over the North Bridge to Punkatasset Hill (p. 16). BAR contains an account of the activities at the Barrett farm in anticipation of the arrival of the British soldiers (3:6–7); some of this account is drawn from the interview Benson J. Lossing had with Colonel Barrett’s grandson James in 1848, which is referred to in Lossing’s Pictorial Field-book of the Revolution, 1:551. Parson’s search of the Barrett farm under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Barrett is described in BAR, 3:23–24, 46. Robert Gross in The Minutemen and Their World writes of Lieutenant Joseph Hosmer’s prickly personality and his role as Concord’s “most dangerous man” (pp. 64–65). On the history of the Bedford flag, see Sharon Lawrence McDonald’s The Bedford Flag Unfurled, pp. 8–13, 33–39, 52–58. On the New Englanders’ uneasy relationship with their region’s native history and how “a white man in Indian costume could envision himself as an American ideal, both civilized and free,” see Benjamin Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots, pp. 147–57, as well as my Mayflower, pp. 357–58. In 1850 Amos Baker (then known as “the last survivor” of the Concord fight) described James Nichols’s conversation with the regulars at the North Bridge and his decision not to participate in the fight in his “Affidavit of the Last Survivor,” printed in Joel Parker’s Address to the Students of the University of Cambridge, pp. 133–35. See also Michael Ryan’s “Mysterious Militia Man Deserts at Old North Bridge,” Concord Magazine, March/April 2001, available at http://www.concordma.com/magazine/marapr01/mysteryman.html.

  Affidavits about Isaac Davis’s actions on April 19 are in Josiah Adams, Letter to Lemuel Shattuck, pp. 14–20; Ellen Chase provides a useful distillation of this material in BAR, 3:24–28. See also Michael Ryan’s “The Concord Fight and a Fearless Isaac Davis,” Concord Magazine, May 1999, available at http://www.concordma.com/magazine/may99/davis.html. Ryan also writes about the tune the fifer in Davis’s company was reputedly playing in “White Cockade: A Jacobite Air at the North Bridge?” available at https://www2.bc.edu/~hafner/lmm/music-articles/white_cockade_ryan.html. Lemuel Shattuck tells of Joseph Hosmer “earnestly” inquiring, “Will you let them burn the town down?” in History of Concord, p. 111. In Gage’s official account of April 19, 1775, the townspeople of Concord are described as “sulky”; JEPC, p. 680. Martha Moulton’s testimony appears in Richard Frothingham’s HSOB, p. 369; Ellen Chase provides a good account of the activities of the British regulars in Concord in BAR, 3:19–21. George Bancroft writes that the Concord schoolmaster “could never afterwards find words strong enough to express how [Davis’s] face reddened at the word of command”; Bancroft also repeats Davis’s famous words, “I have not a man that is afraid to go,” in his History of the United States, 2:302. Lieutenant Jeremy Lister’s claim that the militiamen marched “with as much order as the best disciplined troops” is in Kehoe, p. 116. John Galvin describes how Laurie’s street-firing maneuver should have worked in The Minute Men, pp. 150–51. Lieutenant Sutherland’s description of what happened at the North Bridge is in Kehoe, pp. 142–43. Amos Doolittle’s engraving of the scene is titled “The Engagement at the North Bridge in Concord.” My thanks to William Fowler for his input regarding the muzzle velocity of a musket in a personal communication. Amos Barrett’s memory of how “their balls whistled well” is in his Narrative in Journal and Letters of Henry True, p. 33. Amos Baker’s statement that “we concluded they were firing jack-knives” can be found in his “Affidavit of the Last Survivor.” D. Hamilton Hurd in History of Middlesex County describes the death of Isaac Davis: “The ball passed quite through his body, making a very large wound, perhaps driving in a button of his coat. His blood gushed out in one great stream, flying, it is said, more than 10 feet, besprinkling and besmearing his own clothes . . . and the clothes of Orderly Sergeant David Forbush and a file leader, Thomas Thorpe” (1:261). Captain David Brown is credited with crying out, “God damn them, they are firing balls!” in Frederic Hudson, “The Concord Fight,” p. 797.

  According to Reverend Emerson’s great-granddaughter Phebe Ripley Chamberlin, Emerson’s wife told her “that she felt hurt because [her husband] did not stay more with her [on April 19] and once when he was feeding the women and children with bread and cheese she knocked on the widow and said to him that she thought she needed him as much as the others,” in Diaries and Letters of William Emerson, p. 73. According to William Gordon in a May 17, 1775, letter, Emerson “was nearer the regulars than the killed” when the firing began at the North Bridge; Gordon also writes that Emerson was “very uneasy till he found that the fire was returned,” AA4, 2:630. Emerson’s March 13, 1775, sermon is in his Diaries and Letters, p. 65. Frederic Hudson writes that Major Buttrick cried, �
�Fire, fellow soldiers, for God’s sake, fire!” in “The Concord Fight,” p. 797; Thaddeus Blood tells how “the fire was almost simultaneous with the cry” in his Narrative. Lieutenant Lister’s description of how the regulars crumbled before the provincial fire is in Kehoe, p. 116. Amos Barrett’s memory of how the regulars retreated, “running and a hobbling about,” as well as how he and other provincial soldiers lay behind a stone wall on the hill overlooking the North Bridge with their “guns cocked expecting every minute to have the word—fire,” is in Journal and Letters of Henry True, p. 33. Thaddeus Blood’s account of how after crossing the North Bridge “everyone appeared to be his own commander” is in his Narrative. William Gordon records the Reverend Emerson’s account of the Ammi White incident: “A young fellow coming over the bridge in order to join the country people, and seeing the soldier wounded and attempting to get up, not being under the feelings of humanity, very barbarously broke his skull, and let out his brains with a small axe” (AA4, 2:630). See also Michael Ryan’s “Senseless Act Begets Rage and Propaganda” in February 1999 Concord Magazine; also available at http://www.concordma.com/magazine/feb99/scalping.html. Jeremy Lister’s account of the rumor instigated by Ammi White’s attack on the wounded regular is in Kehoe, p. 116. The regulars’ claim that the provincials would scalp any soldier “they get alive, that are wounded and cannot get off the ground,” along with the additional claim that the militiamen are “full as bad as the Indians,” is in an April 28, 1775, letter in AA4, 2:439.

  On the importance of the flank guards, see Douglas Sabin’s April 19, 1775, p. 125. Edmund Foster’s account of how the fighting started on the road back to Lexington is in Ezra Ripley’s History of the Fight at Concord, p. 33. Lister’s account of how a musket ball “effectually disabled” his right arm is in Kehoe, p. 117. Barker writes of how the regulars were fired on “from all sides” in his Diary, p. 35. Samuel Thompson’s account of how the regulars “stooped for shelter from the walls” is in BAR, 3:70. Ellen Chase writes that “50 years later eye-witnesses recalled the peculiar ‘swish, swish’ made by the grass as the regulars brushed through it” in BAR, 3:28. Douglas Sabin in April 19, 1775, provides a detailed account of the deaths of Jonathan Wilson and Daniel Thompson in the vicinity of the Samuel Hartwell house, pp. 134–35; Sabin also tells of James Hayward’s fatal encounter with a regular at the well near the Fiske house (p. 149). William Gordon writes of how “the people say that the soldiers are worse than the Indians” in his May 17, 1775, letter in AA4, 2:630. Sarah Bailey writes of Ford and Furbush and the dying grenadier in Historical Sketches of Andover, pp. 307–8; see also BAR, 3:63–64. Lieutenant Barker writes of being “totally surrounded by such an incessant fire” in his Diary, p. 35. David Hackett Fischer in Paul Revere’s Ride writes that the hill on which the Lexington militia ambushed Colonel Smith’s column is called today Parker’s Revenge (p. 229). Douglas Sabin in April 19, 1775 points to Concord Hill as the place at which the column began to collapse, p. 151. Ensign DeBerniere’s account of how the regulars were thrown “into confusion” and “began to run rather than retreat in order” is in Kehoe, p. 122. Lieutenant Barker’s insistence that if Percy’s brigade had not appeared “we must soon have laid down our arms or been picked off by the rebels at their pleasure” is in his Diary, p. 37. Lieutenant Sutherland’s description of Percy’s brigade as “one of the best dispositions ever I saw” and of their “sanguine hopes” is in Kehoe, p. 144.