Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Preface: The Decisive Day
On a hot, almost windless afternoon in June, a
seven-year-old boy stood beside his mother and looked out across the green
islands of Boston
Harbor
At that moment, John Adams, the boy’s father, was more than
three hundred miles to the south at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia . Years later,
the elder Adams claimed that the American Revolution had started not with the
Boston Massacre, or the Tea Party, or the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord
and all the rest, but had been “effected before the war
commenced . . . in the minds and hearts of the people.” For his
son, however, the “decisive day” (a phrase used by the boy’s mother, Abigail)
was June 17, 1775.
Seventy-one years after that day, in the jittery script of
an old man, John Quincy Adams described the terrifying afternoon when he and
his mother watched the battle from a hill beside their home in Braintree: “I
saw with my own eyes those fires, and heard Britannia’s thunders in the Battle
of Bunker’s hill and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled with them my
own.” They feared, he recounted, that the British troops might at any moment
march out of Boston
and “butcher them in cold blood” or take them as hostages and drag them back
into the besieged city. But what he remembered most about the battle was the
hopeless sense of sorrow that he and his mother felt when they learned that
their family physician, Dr. Joseph Warren, had been killed.
Joseph Warren, just thirty-four at the time of his
death, had been much more than a beloved doctor to a seven-year-old boy. Over
the course of the two critical months between the outbreak of hostilities at
Lexington Green and the Battle of Bunker Hill, he became the most influential
patriot leader in the province
of Massachusetts Philadelphia at the Second
Continental Congress, Warren
was orchestrating the on-the-ground reality of a revolution.
This is also the story of two British generals. The first,
Thomas Gage, was saddled with the impossible task of implementing his
government’s unnecessarily punitive response to the Boston Tea Party in
December 1773. Gage had a scrupulous respect for the law and was therefore ill
equipped to subdue a people who were perfectly willing to take that law into
their own hands. When fighting broke out at Lexington
and Concord , militiamen from across the region
descended upon the British stationed at Boston .
Armed New Englanders soon cut off the land approaches to Boston . Ironically, the former center of
American resistance found itself gripped by an American siege. By the time
General William Howe replaced Gage as the British commander in chief, he had
determined that New York , not Boston , was where he must
resume the fight. It was left to Washington
to hasten the departure of Howe and his army.
The evacuation of the British in March 1776 signaled the
beginning of an eight-year war that produced a new nation. But it also marked
the end of an era that had started back in 1630 with the founding of the
Puritan settlement called Boston .
This is the story of how a revolution changed that 146-year-old community—of
what was lost and what was gained when 150 vessels filled with British soldiers
and American loyalists sailed from Boston
Harbor
Over the more than two centuries since the Revolution, Boston has undergone
immense physical change. Most of the city’s once-defining hills have been
erased from the landscape while the marshes and mudflats that surrounded Boston have been filled in
to eliminate almost all traces of the original waterfront. But hints of the
vanished town remain. Several meetinghouses and churches from the colonial era
are still standing, along with a smattering of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century houses. Looking southeast from the balcony of the Old State
House, you can see how the spine of what was once called King Street connects
this historic seat of government, originally known as the Town House, to Long
Wharf, an equally historic commercial center that still reaches out into the
harbor.
For the last three years I have been exploring these
places, trying to get a fix on the long-lost topography that is essential to
understanding how Boston’s former residents interacted. Boston in the 1770s was a land-connected
island with a population of about fifteen thousand, all of whom probably
recognized, if not knew, each other. Being myself a resident of an island with
a year-round population very close in size to provincial Boston’s, I have some
familiarity with how petty feuds, family alliances, professional jealousies,
and bonds of friendship can transform a local controversy into a supercharged
outpouring of communal angst. The issues are real enough, but why we find
ourselves on one side or the other of those issues is often unclear even to us.
Things just happen in a way that has little to do with
logic or rationality and everything to do with the mysterious and infinitely
complex ways that human beings respond to one another.
In the beginning there were three different colonial groups
in Massachusetts .
One group was aligned with those who eventually became revolutionaries. For
lack of a better word, I will call these people “patriots.” Another group
remained faithful to the crown, and they appear herein as “loyalists.” Those in
the third and perhaps largest group were not sure where they stood. Part of
what makes a revolution such a fascinating subject to study is the arrival of
the moment when neutrality is no longer an option. Like it or not, a person has
to choose.
It was not a simple case of picking right from wrong.
Hindsight has shown that, contrary to what the patriots insisted, Britain
had not launched a preconceived effort to enslave her colonies. Compared with
other outposts of empire, the American colonists were exceedingly well off. It’s
been estimated that they were some of the most prosperous, least-taxed people
in the Western world. And yet there was more to the patriots’ overheated claims
about oppression than the eighteenth-century equivalent of a conspiracy theory.
The hyperbole and hysteria that so mystified the loyalists had wellsprings that
were both ancient and strikingly immediate. For patriots and loyalists alike,
this was personal.
Because a revolution gave birth to our nation,
Americans have a tendency to exalt the concept of a popular uprising. We want
the whole world to be caught in a blaze of liberating upheaval (with
appropriately democratic results) because that was what worked so well for us.
If Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, the
guidebook that has become a kind of bible among twenty-first-century
revolutionaries in the Middle East and beyond,
is any indication, the mechanics of overthrowing a regime are essentially the
same today as they were in the eighteenth century. And yet, given our tendency
to focus on the Founding Fathers who were at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia when all of this was unfolding in and around Boston , most of us know surprisingly little about how the
patriots of Massachusetts
pulled it off.
In the pages that follow, I hope to provide an intimate
account of how over the course of just eighteen months a revolution transformed
a city and the towns that surrounded it, and how that transformation influenced
what eventually became the Unites States of America . This is the story of two
charismatic and forceful leaders (one from Massachusetts, the other from
Virginia), but it is also the story of two ministers (one a subtle, even
Machiavellian, patriot, the other a punster and a loyalist); of a poet,
patriot, and caregiver to four orphaned children; of a wealthy merchant who
wanted to be everybody’s friend; of a conniving traitor whose girlfriend
betrayed him; of a sea captain from Marblehead who became America’s first naval
hero; of a bookseller with a permanently mangled hand who after a 300-mile trek
through the wilderness helped to force the evacuation of the British; and of
many others.
In the end, the city of Boston is the true hero of this story.
Whether its inhabitants came to view the Revolution as an opportunity or as a
catastrophe, they all found themselves in the midst of a survival tale when on
December 16, 1773, three shiploads of tea were dumped in Boston Harbor
**End of Excerpt**
For more, check out Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick
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