Chapter 24
“A Dear Bought Victory”
And now,” wrote Major General John Burgoyne with his usual dramatic flair, “ensued one of the greatest scenes of war that can be conceived: if we look to the height, Howe’s corps ascending the hill in the face of intrenchments, and in a very disadvantageous ground, was much engaged; to the left the enemy pouring in fresh troops by thousands, over the land; and in the arm of the sea our ships and floating batteries cannonading them; straight before us a large and noble Town [Charlestown] in one great blaze—the church-steeples being timber, were great pyramids of fire above the rest; behind us, the church-steeples and heights of our own camp [Boston] covered with spectators of the rest of our Army which was engaged; the hills round the country covered with spectators; the enemy all in anxious suspense; the roar of cannon, mortars, and musketry.” Perhaps the worst part, Burgoyne concluded, was the reflection that a defeat here would be “a final loss to the British Empire in America.”1
GENERATIONS OF ARMCHAIR STRATEGISTS WOULD later fault General Howe for sending his troops to slaughter by marching them in two long lines up Breed’s Hill. It wasn’t quite that simple, and that frontal maneuver in and of itself was certainly not Howe’s initial intent. To be sure, his advance was slow and not in column, save for the light infantry companies on the beach, but by all accounts Howe placed great faith in his light infantry’s ability to turn the end of the rebel line and create havoc along it. After that, the grenadier companies, supported by the Fifth and Fifty-Second Regiments, would bulldoze through the rebel left with bayonets fixed and trap Prescott’s men in the redoubt.2
On the rebel right, Brigadier General Pigot was trying somewhat the same maneuver on a more limited scale—given the narrow confines between the redoubt and Charlestown as opposed to the wide ground in front of Howe. Thus this was not an overconfident frontal assault—even if it turned out that way—but a calculated thrust designed to turn the rebel flanks and roll up the entire lot of them behind Prescott’s redoubt. If that had indeed happened, it is interesting to speculate what action, if any, Colonel Putnam might have taken from atop Bunker Hill. Instead, the result was that Colonel John Stark and his New Hampshire men stood firm on the beach and at the rail fence and thwarted Howe’s flanking attempt.
Eleven companies of light infantry, comprising about 350 men and led by the company from the Twenty-Third Regiment—the Royal Welch Fusiliers—rushed headlong in a column of fours against Stark’s hastily erected rock piles on the Mystic beach. The first volley from the rebel line decimated this advance company. The second company in the column, that of the Fourth “King’s Own,” confidently moved forward to take its place, expecting to reach the defenders and rout them with bayonets. Stark’s men, however, were positioned three deep, and before the attackers could gain more than a few yards, another ragged volley rent the air and ripped apart the men from the King’s Own. Onward the column of light infantry came, but the New Hampshire lads continued to put up a hail of fire, and “as the broken lines of each company gave way, the successor pressed forward, only in turn to be shattered.”3
The grenadier companies and regiments marching in two lines on the slope above the beach heard these musket volleys without being able to ascertain the results. They likely expected to hear a cheer as their light infantry comrades swept around the end of the rebel line and its defenders fled before them. But there was no cheer from the beach. Even more ominously, there was no movement from the rebel line behind the rail fence.
Howe had indeed intended that the grenadiers and men of the Fifth and Fifty-Second Regiments would sweep through the rebel line at the rail fence with bayonets alone—hard steel driven home. But as the coordinated light infantry attack collapsed on the beach, these advancing troops were thwarted in a bayonet charge both by the terrain—the difficulty in climbing over and through other fences en route—and by the heavy fire from the American line, which had in no way been abated by the light infantry attack.
“As fast as the front man was shot down,” one rebel report claimed, “the next stepped forward into his place, but our men dropt them so fast, they were a long time coming up.” What was most surprising to this observer was how the British regulars “would step over their dead bodies, as though they had been logs of wood.”4
As Howe told the story, the grenadiers made the attack with “a laudable perseverance, but not the greatest share of discipline,” because rather than pushing the bayonet charge they took time to load and “began firing, and by crowding fell into disorder, and in this State the 2d Line mixt with them.” The only thing worse was what was happening on the beach to the companies of light infantry. “The Light Infantry at the same time being repulsed,” wrote Howe, “there was a Moment that I never felt before.”5
Pigot’s attack on the American right and the redoubt met with similar failure, but just how aggressive Pigot was in pushing this first wave on his side of the battlefield has always been a matter of debate. Howe and Pigot may well have agreed that Pigot would make a feint in strength on the American right to distract Prescott’s men while Howe swept around the left flank. Pigot would not charge the redoubt itself until Howe’s troops were circling behind it. It’s also quite possible that having encountered fences impeding their orderly advance, and still taking some fire from the outskirts of burning Charlestown, Pigot’s advance bogged down in the face of fire from Prescott’s lines in much the same manner as Howe’s did.
Faced with the collapse of the light infantry’s flanking attack, Howe’s advance of the grenadiers and supporting regiments indeed took on the look of an ill-advised frontal attack. Their now-ragged lines were subjected to rebel fire from the breastworks extending from the redoubt and all along the main rail fence. There was apparently also rebel fire from a trio of hastily erected fleches, or angled fieldworks, that were constructed by unknown troops—perhaps part of Knowlton’s command—between the redoubt breastworks and the rail fence. In the face of this concentrated fire, the British lines ground to a halt and then broke and fled back toward Moulton’s Hill. Their officers tried in vain to halt the retreat. “Many of our men,” recalled one rebel report, “were for pursuing, [but by] the prudence of the officers they were prevented leaving so advantageous a post.”6
General Howe now faced a crucial decision. He could withdraw his troops and avoid more slaughter, or he could re-form his command and attack again. In practice, there was really no decision to be made. Howe’s next act was preordained and unequivocal. He had no alternative but to order his men back up the hill to dislodge the rebels. To do anything less—particularly with Clinton and Burgoyne watching his every movement from Copp’s Hill—would have been unthinkable. Howe was less than enthusiastic about taking on his American cousins, but once he embarked from Boston and became committed to the field on this mission, he had no choice—short of utter shame—than to prosecute it to a decisive conclusion.
SO THE BRITISH LINES MOVED forward once again. Whether this was a completely new assault separated in time and space or merely a continuation of the first advance after some regrouping has always been a matter of debate. On the field itself, it was difficult if not impossible to get a clear picture of what was happening. Events tended to telescope together in the observer’s mind. The best view and tactical understanding may have been with Generals Clinton and Burgoyne as they watched this drama unfold from the battery on Copp’s Hill. Even Clinton and Burgoyne, however, could not see far enough around Moulton’s Point to observe the complete disaster of the light infantry companies on the Mystic beach. Nonetheless, what they could see of Pigot’s unsuccessful advance left little doubt that this was a disaster in the making.
As the third-ranking major general on the scene, John Burgoyne indeed had little to do except mind the artillery and form the mental picture from which he would write his vivid description of the battle. General Gage had charged Henry Clinton, however, with hastening Howe’s reserve—the Forty-Seventh Regiment and First Marines—into action from the North Battery should Howe call for it or should Clinton “observe the smallest occasion to reinforce him.”7 This Clinton had done before the first assault, but seeing the attack collapse, he now determined to join the battle personally.
“On seeing our left give totally away,” Clinton recalled, “I desired G[eneral] B[urgoyne] who was with me to save me harmless to G[eneral] G[age] for going without his orders and went over to join with H[owe].”8 At some point, Clinton also acknowledged Howe’s request for reinforcements—as opposed merely for his reserve, which was already committed—and dispatched the Sixty-Third Regiment and the Second Marines from the North Battery, although neither would arrive in time for much action. Clinton, however, would soon be in the thick of things.
Meanwhile, the Americans in Prescott’s redoubt could not afford even the hint of a victory celebration. To be sure, they had as yet lost few men and had broken the British advance, but they had done so with repeated firings. Their gunpowder supply was nearly as exhausted as they were after a sleepless night of digging and a hot day under frequent bombardment. From Colonel Prescott down to the greenest private, the men remaining in the redoubt and adjacent breastworks alternated glances between the British lines massed to their front and the conglomeration of fresh colonial troops waiting expectantly at their rear. Who would be the first to reach their position? Where was Colonel Putnam? Where was General Ward?
At best, history would pay Artemas Ward little mind, and he would be the largely unknown and unsung commander in chief of the rebels. At worst, Ward would be remembered as the general who never left his headquarters in Cambridge—which is probably not true—while all hell broke loose around Bunker Hill. That Ward didn’t provide adequate command and control to Putnam and Prescott is a certainty, but whether he should have ridden to the sound of the guns, as Joseph Warren did, is debatable. The Massachusetts committee of safety charged General Ward with protecting the rebels’ encirclement of Boston, including their supply center in Cambridge. Given the uncertainty about the number of troops Howe had deployed against Charlestown, Ward’s broader mission was to guard against simultaneous attacks at Roxbury via Boston Neck—should Lord Percy do more in that direction than exercise his cannons—or directly across the Charles River at Lechmere Point, as Colonel Smith had done on the night of April 18. Indeed, Ward had no way of knowing the full extent of the British attack until quite late on the afternoon of June 17. Whatever happened on the heights above Charlestown, Ward’s first duty was to keep Cambridge secure.9
That said, Ward seems to have conferred with Putnam at least once that morning as Putnam dashed back and forth between Cambridge and Bunker Hill. These conversations, or Ward’s independent actions, resulted in Stark’s New Hampshire men eventually making their way to the rail fence. What Ward evidently didn’t do was provide Putnam much direction as to whether he should reinforce Prescott in force on Breed’s Hill, hold Bunker Hill itself, or organize a withdrawal from the entire Charlestown peninsula.
Artemas Ward has long been a convenient scapegoat. But from his plans on the evening of June 16 for rotating troops to relieve Prescott’s command to his sending additional regiments to the Charlestown peninsula—as the number of Howe’s attacking troops suggested that his was to be the one and only thrust of the day—Ward acted with some degree of operational clarity and competence. The weak link was his inability to implement his directives at the regimental level. In great measure this was because Ward had very little staff and no brigade or division command structure between his headquarters and the individual regiments. (Such a hierarchy would not be formally established until George Washington arrived on the scene.) Regiments of three or four hundred men attempting to maneuver as units over narrow roads and unfamiliar terrain further muddied the situation.10
This chaos aside, what was Colonel Putnam doing with the troops he did have in the field? Exhorting them to fight, to be sure, but again, any measure of command and control over the disparate regiments and their fragmented companies was fleeting at best. Then, too, there is evidence that Putnam became occupied with the continuing saga of the rebel artillery. Certainly he pushed at least several pieces into the critical gap between the breastwork extending from the redoubt and the rail fence. Some reports even have him stopping to lend a hand with placement and firing. It was an example of selflessly doing what needed to be done, but in the broader view, this did little to reinforce Prescott or deploy arriving troops.
Captain John Chester’s company of Spencer’s Connecticut Regiment made it into the field, but their experience was indicative of the broader command problems. Early that afternoon, Colonel Putnam’s son Daniel galloped into Cambridge with shouts that the British were landing at Charlestown and told Chester, “Father says you must all meet, and march immediately to Bunker Hill to oppose the enemy.” Chester roused his men from the church where they were billeted and then stopped short as his eyes beheld their splendid blue uniforms with red facings. His company was one of the few among the continentals even to have uniforms. Such a display wouldn’t do, Chester decided, and he ordered his men to put their “frocks and trowsers” on over their uniforms because “we were loath to expose ourselves by our dress.”
Chester then led his men at a fast march across the neck and up to the crest of Bunker Hill. It was chaos—that was one thing upon which all reports agree. “When we arrived,” Chester recalled, “there was not a company with us in any kind of order, although, when we first set out, perhaps three regiments were by our side.” All around them, men were scattered behind rocks and small hay piles; thirty men clustered behind an apple tree. Others, to Chester’s chagrin, were retreating, “seemingly without any excuse.” Chester asked why and was given a lengthy list of reasons, from lack of “officers to head them” to the fact that “they had been all night and day on fatigue, without sleep, victuals, or drink.”
But then Chester spied an entire company marching along in rank and file bound away from the British advance. He accosted the officer in command and asked why he was retreating. When the officer made no answer, Chester halted his own men “and told him if he went on it should be at his peril.” Chester ordered his own company to make ready and declared to this flighty bunch that his men would fire if he so ordered. “Upon that they stopped short, tried to excuse themselves,” but Chester ordered them to about-face, and momentarily they followed his company down off the crest of Bunker Hill toward Prescott’s redoubt.11
Another of those rushing into action was fifteen-year-old John Greenwood, a fifer with Captain Theodore Bliss’s company of Patterson’s Massachusetts Regiment. Having had permission to be in Cambridge earlier that day, Greenwood crossed the neck and hastened up Bunker Hill, looking for his company. Uneasy without his comrades, Greenwood was petrified by the scene and recalled that he “could positively feel my hair stand on end.” As he got near the crest, he met a black man who was wounded in the back of his neck coming toward him. Greenwood “saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back.” He asked the man if it hurt, and “he said no, that he was going to get a plaster put on it, and meant to return.” That show of resolve gave young Greenwood a shot of encouragement, and he “began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment.” Greenwood went on to find his company and went into action with them “on the road in sight of the battle, with two field-pieces.”12
On the slopes below, Howe and Pigot were preparing for yet another assault. Their second attempt—or perhaps it was a grim continuation of the first advance—had also fallen short. Seeing the absolute carnage that Stark’s men had visited on his grenadiers and light infantry, Howe now angled his right flank toward the redoubt and its breastworks in an attempt to take them directly and avoid coming within deadly range of the rail fence. His battered companies of light infantry made a feint in Stark’s direction to hold the colonel’s troops in position, but the bulk of Howe’s next advance was in concert with Pigot against Prescott’s positions in and around the redoubt.13
Given the slow but steady withdrawal of his troops, Colonel Prescott was down to about 150 men in the redoubt. “The enemy advanced and fired very hotly on the fort,” Prescott reported to John Adams afterward, “and meeting a warm reception, there was a very smart firing on both sides.” Finding their gunpowder and musket balls “almost spent,” Prescott ordered a short pause in the firing from the redoubt. If this momentary silence heartened the advancing regulars, they were soon blasted by the fury of Prescott’s remaining volleys.14
Now the British front ranks were at the base of the redoubt. John Waller, the adjutant of Pitcairn’s marines, reported that they encountered “the severe fire of the enemy, but did not retreat an inch.” Major John Pitcairn, twenty-nine-year veteran of His Majesty’s service and recent participant in the Concord raid, had been hoping that this campaign in North America would be his last. It was. As he led his men at the redoubt, he was shot in the head.
Legend has it that he fell into the arms of his son William. Certainly it was William Pitcairn who tended to his father as he was evacuated to Boston, where he died soon afterward. The other piece of the legend of the Pitcairn death is that Peter Salem, the black freeman from Framingham who had been at Concord, fired the shot that killed him. Perhaps. It was simply impossible to tell, but the fact that Salem’s role was captured in John Trumbull’s painting of Pitcairn’s death—however dramatized the moment—is a testament to the hundred-some African Americans estimated to have fought on the rebel side. On Bunker and Breed’s Hills that day, there was equality—for a fleeting moment.
With Pitcairn struck down close by, and a captain, a subaltern, and a sergeant also slain, Adjutant Waller ran across the hillside and commanded the men to stop firing so that they might advance into the redoubt with bayonets. “Had we stopped there much longer,” Waller maintained, “the enemy would have picked us all off.” Instead he got his men into “tolerable order,” and they “rushed on, leaped the ditch, and climbed the parapet, under a most sore and heavy fire.”15 Confessed Waller, “I did not think, at one time, that I should ever have been able to write this, though in the heat of the action I thought nothing of the matter.”16
As Major Pitcairn fell, Joseph Warren became the high-profile casualty on the American side. Warren’s actions that day would also become the stuff of legend, but one must wonder if he did not harbor some fixation on having a martyr’s death. There would be many who would give their lives for the rebel cause unselfishly and without much thought in the years ahead, but Warren seems to have been at the other extreme—one who made a needless sacrifice to satisfy no cause but his own desire to be in the thick of the action.
Joseph Warren’s presence on Breed’s Hill, however praised in patriotic telling, seems only to have confused the rebel chain of command. Particularly with Samuel Adams and John Hancock occupied in Philadelphia, one cannot help but wonder if Warren’s higher duty lay in keeping a steady hand on the work of the committee of safety in Cambridge. So high were the contemporary compliments of his skills that had Warren survived he might well have come to occupy an even greater position in the republic born from his efforts. But Warren rushed to the field and was struck down by a British musket ball in the last bloody fighting at the redoubt.
Having turned the front of his assault away from the rail fence and aimed it squarely toward the redoubt, Howe was now able to aim his bogged-down cannons to the left and fire down the line of the breastworks below the redoubt. This use of artillery and the advancing ranks of infantry drove the American defenders from that line. Most of these men retreated toward the higher end of the rail fence. A few unlucky ones sought shelter in the redoubt.17
What ended the American resistance in the redoubt was neither a lack of courage nor unstoppable British resolve but rather the absence of rebel gunpowder. The acute awareness of dwindling powder supplies had hastened the exodus from Prescott’s ranks as Pigot’s troops advanced yet again. Prescott directed his men to hold steady for one final fusillade, but with few bayonets and spears among the remaining defenders, once their gunpowder was expended there was nothing they could do but flee.
British bayonets ran through those who did not do so with enough dispatch. After the rebels were surrounded, it was over in seconds. Even Lieutenant Waller admitted that the bayonet work of the regulars was shocking. “I cannot pretend to describe the Horror of the Scene within the Redoubt when we enter’d it,” he wrote a friend four days later. “ ’Twas streaming with Blood & strew’d with dead & dying Men the Soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the Brains of others was a sight too dreadful for me to dwell any longer on.”18
According to a British history written soon after the war, “the British soldiers, stung with the reflection of having given way before an enemy whom they despised, now returned with irresistible impetuosity, forced the intrenchments with fixed bayonets, and drove the provincials from their works.”19 General Howe merely noted that after the burning of Charlestown “relieved Pigot from the difficulty upon his left… he carried the Redoubt in a very handsome manner, at the second onset, tho’ it was most obstinately defended to the last, thirty of the rebels having been killed by bayonets within it.”20
Peter Brown, who had stood firm all day despite misgivings, was one of the lucky ones who escaped the redoubt. “I was not suffered to be toutched,” Brown reassured his mother, “altho I was in the fort when the Enemy came in, and jumped over the walls, and ran half a mile where Balls flew like Hailstones, and Canons roared like Thunder.”21
This rapid rout from the redoubt did not, however, signal panic or a mass retreat along the rebel lines—far from it. Captain John Chester’s company of Connecticut men had taken up a position at a stone wall somewhere below the crest of Bunker Hill overlooking the redoubt. “Here,” Chester reported, “we lost our regularity, as every company had done before us, and fought as they did, every man loading and firing as fast as he could.” The stone wall was only two or three feet high, and bullets came through it with ease. “Good God, how the Balls flew,” remembered Chester’s lieutenant, Samuel Blachley Webb; “I freely Acknowledge I never had such a tremor come over me before.” But for about six minutes, Chester’s company stood firm and covered Prescott’s retreat “till they came up with us by a brisk fire.”22
And so the redoubt and main rebel breastworks were carried by the regulars’ attack, but far from jubilation, there spread through the British ranks a dazed sense of disbelief. The carnage was almost unpalatable. The slope below the redoubt was a field littered with the red uniforms of the dead and the dying. From officers to the lowest private, no one appeared more dazed than General Howe himself. To his great credit, Howe had not hunkered down in the rear but led from the front. Somehow, despite a disproportionately high loss of officers, Howe came through without a physical scratch. His emotional toll would take some time to determine. The blood of his troops streaked his white gaiters, and the red of his uniform hid the dark blotches of much more.
Henry Clinton, after scurrying up the hill behind Pigot’s troops, found Howe in this state and offered to take the lead in pressing the attack home toward Cambridge. “All was in Confusion,” according to Clinton. “Officers told me that they could not command their men and I never saw so great a want of order.” Howe thanked Clinton for his service in crossing from Boston to join the battle and appeared to acquiesce to Clinton’s advance. But then he called Clinton back and told him to make dispositions for the night and to protect the neck but not advance across it.
Clinton continued up Bunker Hill and soon overtook General Pigot. What Clinton saw of the colonial troops gave him pause and may have made him glad that Howe did not want him directing an all-out continuation of the attack. Stark’s men at the rail fence on the rebel left had given way, but they were retreating “in good order as soon as the men from the redoubt had passed them.” It was definitely a fighting withdrawal and not a panicked rout. This impressed Clinton as well as the British rank and file. The rebels “continued a running fight from one fence, or wall, to another, till we entirely drove them off the peninsula of Charlestown.”23
Even then, Clinton was anxious about what he would find on the Cambridge side of Bunker Hill. “I proceed,” Clinton’s notes read, “expecting that the redoubt made by us on the 19 was occupied, and for that I assembled all I could, but found hardly to be believed that they had left it in a state serviceable only to us I mean as a breast work against them.”24
Some of the troops with Clinton at this point were those of the Fifty-Second Regiment. They took up positions on the Mystic side of Bunker Hill and dug crude earthworks facing the neck. The Forty-Seventh Regiment took up a similar station on the Charles side and secured both the shore road leading back to burning Charlestown and the access road across the millpond dam. After giving these regimental commanders advice on how best to defend their positions, Clinton, “having been there as a Volunteer,” as he said, “returned to Boston.”25 The reported times of all actions throughout the day varied greatly, but according to one source that attempted an accurate timetable, the landing and assault were accomplished in about four hours, the regulars “having entire possession of the Neck by six o’clock.”26
On the American side, there was to be one more significant casualty. Major Andrew McClary, who had served with John Stark in Rogers’ Rangers, was the adjutant of Stark’s First New Hampshire Regiment. McClary had cleared the way for Stark’s regiment to advance through the chaos at the neck only hours before. Having covered a major part of the rebel retreat, Stark’s regiment was now safely back across the neck, but McClary watched with concern as Clinton’s forces clustered at the earthworks on Bunker Hill. McClary worried that the British might attempt to carry the neck and threaten Cambridge—indeed Clinton had considered doing just that. So McClary went back across the neck to reconnoiter the British positions. Satisfying himself that Clinton was holding his position and hunkering down, McClary was returning across the neck when one of the last cannon shots from the British ships in the Charles struck him down. It was a grisly end.27
Despite the losses on the American side and the stigma of having abandoned the field, there was no panic or pell-mell rush to Cambridge. The line of retreat “proceeded no farther than to the next hill.” This was Winter Hill, from which Colonel Pickering and his Essex County men might have ambushed Percy’s column on April 19 if they had taken action. Colonel Putnam had already constructed some entrenchments there as part of his “keep ’em busy” digging operations, and now he ordered more to be dug.
The sounds of picks and shovels broke the evening twilight as the midsummer night descended, but it was the continuing cries of the wounded that made the colonists’ blood run cold. Behind the moans came the dull thudding of cannon fire from across the Back Bay. It was Percy’s artillery, still firing on the Roxbury lines. Gunpowder was one thing the British had in ample supply.28
GENERAL HOWE WAS IN A state of denial and likely remained so for the rest of his military career, if not the rest of his life. He had won the field, of that there was no doubt, but at a staggering cost. The Battle of Bunker Hill was, Henry Clinton opined, “A dear bought victory, another such would have ruined us.”29
In retrospect, there were many things that General Howe might have done differently or to greater effect. The extreme left of the rebel line at the rail fence was anchored, however tenuously, to the shoreline. Had the British sent one of their sloops or the transport Symmetry up the Mystic River, “one charge on their uncovered flank,” one contemporary British historian noted, “might have dislodged them in a moment.” Maybe or maybe not, given the granite resolve of John Stark and his men. But landing British troops in force to the rear of the rebel line, as General Clinton had proposed, might have been more effective than simply marching across an open field against entrenched troops. Such an encircling attack in the American rear would have rendered the breastworks largely useless and forced the rebels to fight their way past British lines to effect a withdrawal.30
From the American side, a better command and control system between General Ward and the regimental level might have avoided the forward position on Breed’s Hill in the first place, or resulted in a determined reinforcement of it from fortifications atop Bunker Hill. Whatever the Americans might have done wrong, however, Stark and his compatriots’ stand at the rail fence is the action that cost the British dearly and saved the rebel lines from an early rout.
What was undeniable were the casualties, bad enough on the American side but horrific to the British, particularly among the officer ranks. General Gage reported his losses as 226 killed and 828 wounded, an appalling casualty rate approaching 50 percent of those engaged. As many as 250 of the wounded may have died in the weeks that followed, and many others were maimed for life. Some companies of forty-odd men, particularly the grenadier and light infantry units that assaulted the rail fence, had less than ten men alive, let alone fit for duty.31
Loyalists in Boston had cheered when they saw the red lines crest the hills and the rebels flee over Charlestown Neck, but it was not long before the cost of this action was brought home. “We were exulting in seeing the flight of our enemies,” Ann Hulton wrote, “but in an hour or two we had occasion to mourn and lament.… In the evening the streets were filled with the wounded and the dying; the sight of which, with the lamentations of the women and children over their husbands and fathers, pierced one to the soul.”32
Ensign Jeremy Lister of the light infantry company of the Tenth Regiment, who was wounded in the arm during the retreat from Concord and thus mercifully avoided duty on the Mystic beach, watched as his wounded comrades were returned to Boston. He soon learned that Lieutenant Waldron Kelly of his company, who had also been at the North Bridge, “was wounded and suppos’d Mortally.” Lister carried the news to Kelly’s wife, “who for some time sat motionless with two small Children close by her.” Summoning up her courage, she went to meet her husband, “who was brought home scarcely alive,” but in time he recovered from his wounds.33
On the American side, the loose nature of the units engaged and the incompleteness of their muster rolls left some doubt as to the exact number of casualties. General Ward’s orderly book recorded 115 killed, 305 wounded, and thirty captured. Many of these casualties occurred during the final British assault on the redoubt. About a month after the battle, George Washington put American losses at 138 killed and 276 wounded, which probably accounted for some who died of their wounds.34
Much as they had done in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, rebel leaders put forward a stream of propaganda favorable to their version of the battle. They couldn’t claim victory, but the dead and dying in Boston were proof that neither had the day been an out-and-out loss. “The particulars of the late battle on Bunker’s Hill have been differently represented,” Rhode Island’s Nathaniel Greene wrote his brother, “[but] upon the whole, I think we have little reason to complain.”35
Being only generally aware of the cost of Great Britain’s self-proclaimed victory, the rebels once again focused on British atrocities. This time it was the burning of Charlestown. “You may easily judge what distress we were in to see and hear Englishmen destroying one another,” wrote Reverend Andrew Eliot of Boston, “and a Town with which we have been so intimately connected, all in flames.”36 What was not mentioned, of course, was that most of Charlestown had been abandoned and that Colonel Prescott’s men had turned it into a military target by using the buildings as cover from which to harry Pigot’s flank.
James Warren, distraught over the death of Joseph Warren, minced no words in his report to Mercy. “With a Savage Barbarity never practised among Civilized Nations,” James told his wife, “they fired and have Utterly destroyed the Town of Charlestown.” James had never been impressed with Artemas Ward, and he would become a harsh critic of the general in the days ahead, but in his “inexpressible Grief” over the death of “my Friend Doctor Warren,” he was already holding Joseph Warren up to sainthood. The doctor “was killd it is supposed in the Lines on the Hill at Charlestown,” James told Mercy, “in a Manner more Glorious to himself than the fate of Wolfe on the plains of Abraham.” Professing his enduring love to Mercy, James concluded, “I will see you as soon as possible; can’t say when.”37
On the British side, the charred chimneys of Charlestown became a symbol of a different kind. “I am just now encamped on the heights of Charles-town, or Bunker’s Hill, the scene of action on the 17th of June,” Captain W. Glanville Evelyn of the Fourth “King’s Own” Regiment reported to his father. “We expect to be pretty late in the field this year,” he continued, “and… I hope before the end of it to be able to tell you that Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and all the capital towns on the Continent, are but stacks of chimneys like Charlestown here.”38
General Howe was not so optimistic. “My corps is now encamped upon these Heights, in a very strong situation,” he told his brother Richard, the admiral, “but I much doubt whether we shall get much farther this Campaign, the rebels, on this side, having entrenched themselves very judiciously, about two miles in our front.” Until he got more reinforcements, Howe said, “we shall not do more than to possess these Heights.”39
In writing Lord George Germain, soon to be Lord Dartmouth’s replacement as Secretary of State for the Colonies, General Burgoyne was more complimentary of Howe’s efforts as well as his results. The only satisfactory feature of his own tenure in Boston to date, Burgoyne told Germain, was “the victory obtained at Charlestown by the conduct and spirit of my friend Howe, and the exemplary, I might say, unexampled bravery of the officers under him.” The result, Burgoyne maintained, was to reestablish “the ascendancy of the King’s troops in public opinion.”
Truth be told, that was a bit of wishful thinking. Burgoyne was also quick to acknowledge that the rebels, though undisciplined, “are expert in the use of firearms, and are led by some very able men.” Among those Burgoyne did not number was Samuel Adams, whom he called “as great a conspirator as ever subverted a state.” And just to show that not all his enmity was directed against Adams and his cohorts, the general managed an interservice swipe at Admiral Graves and the Royal Navy. “It may perhaps be asked in England, what is the Admiral doing?” Burgoyne noted. “I wish I was able to answer that question satisfactorily. But I can only say what he is not doing.”40 Admiral Lord Richard Howe would soon be sent to North America to replace Graves.
The British official who was slow to claim victory and report its casualties to his superiors in Great Britain was General Gage. No matter what Howe felt on the field of battle, or what Clinton and Burgoyne opined from their vantage points, Thomas Gage was still the commander in chief of British troops in North America and the royal governor of Massachusetts, although for weeks his domain had been reduced to a besieged Boston. Ultimately, success or failure was his responsibility.
Gage delayed eight days, until June 25, to write his report to Lord Dartmouth. He waited for General Howe’s report, which he seems to have incorporated almost verbatim, but there is no hint that he hurried Howe along. Margaret Gage was readying herself and her children to leave Boston, and after the carnage on Bunker Hill there was no doubt in Gage’s mind that he would soon follow her to England. Only the slowness of transatlantic communications would delay his departure.
After reciting Howe’s account of the battle, including his assertion that part of the rail fence was “Cannon proof,” Gage concluded, “This Action has shewn the Superiority of the King’s Troops, who under every disadvantage Attacked and defeated above three times their own Number, strongly posted, and covered by Breast works.”41 Those were hardly the odds, but this version was for public consumption.
In an accompanying private letter to Dartmouth, Gage was more frank and unguarded. In assuring Dartmouth that the battle was “very Necessary in our Situation,” Gage nonetheless wished “most sincerely that it had not cost us so dear.” His casualties were greater than “our Force can afford to lose,” but even more ominous was his assessment of his opponents. “The Tryals we have had,” Gage confessed, “shew that the Rebels are not the despicable Rabble too many have supposed them to be, and I find it owing to a Military Spirit encouraged amongst them for a few years past, joined with an uncommon Degree of Zeal and Enthousiasm that they are otherwise.”42
“I think it my Duty to let your Lordship know,” Gage concluded, “the true Situation of Affairs, that Administration may take Measures accordingly.” Lord North and George III’s government would indeed take measures, but after the reports of Bunker Hill, their actions would be to order Dartmouth to recall Gage to England and within months to replace Dartmouth with Lord George Germain.
Having sent Lord Barrington, the secretary of war, the perfunctory return of the killed and wounded, Gage also wrote a private letter to him. “These People,” Gage warned, referring to the rebels, “Show a Spirit and Conduct against us, they never showed against the French.” And then, with a frustration that went far deeper than military analysis, Gage said of Boston, “I wish this Cursed place was burned, the only use is its harbor, which may be said to be Material; but in all other respects its the worst place either to act Offensively from, or defencively.”43
When Gage finally received the summons recalling him to England via HMS Scarborough on September 26, it was reportedly to confer about plans for major operations in North America during 1776. But Gage knew full well that he would not return to North America. He had spent the better part of his military career there. There would be other British defeats in North America, but for shock and loss of life, it is hard to name two more significant than those that bookended Thomas Gage’s career on that continent: Braddock’s Defeat and the Battle of Bunker Hill. Without pomp or ceremony, Gage sailed from Boston on October 11, 1775.44 For better or worse, William Howe assumed command of the British troops in Boston.
IF THE CONFRONTATIONS AT LEXINGTON Green and Concord’s North Bridge were the sparks that lit the fuse to the powder keg of war, Bunker Hill was the great explosion. After Bunker Hill, there was no doubt on either side that this was all-out war. Whatever bonds had tied the two sides together were severed.
Some historians suggest that the military importance of Bunker Hill is overstated. Yet American history celebrates it—and the public at large recognizes it—with the same reverence and special awe accorded to Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Pearl Harbor. If one only counted control of the battlefield, Bunker Hill was a British victory, but in the rebel psyche in 1775, the battle was a huge morale booster. As the first major clash between rebel forces and British regulars, it proved that the rebel resistance at Lexington and Concord had legs and that troops who would increasingly be called American could hold their own. The American Revolution was not begun at Bunker Hill; it certainly was not decided at Bunker Hill; but Bunker Hill proved that the drive for independence, and the formal makings of the nation itself, were truly begun in the American spring of 1775.