Epilogue

Monday, July 3, 1775

The Battle of Bunker Hill—whether one chooses to characterize it as an American or British victory—had one immediate and undeniable impact on the fledgling Continental Army. After hearing the results of the battle and judging it an American opportunity, if not a victory, the Continental Congress authorized the invasion of Canada. Rebel overtures of alliance and mutual support north of the border earlier that spring had fallen on deaf ears, but on June 23 Ethan Allen and Seth Warner finally arrived in Philadelphia. They made their case for keeping Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point and urged an invasion north from there. On June 27, the Continental Congress authorized Major General Philip Schuyler to “take possession of St. Johns, Montreal, and any other parts of the country, and pursue any other measures in Canada.”¹

A heroic campaign against Montreal and Quebec late in 1775 was nearly successful. The failed effort ultimately sapped the strength of American efforts around Boston, but Canada would remain the object of American desires for another century. During the War of 1812, acquiring Canada would be the focal point of three years of unsuccessful invasion attempts by the United States. The lust for Canada continued through the American Civil War, after which some Unionists demanded Canada as compensation for Great Britain’s pro-Southern activities.

In July of 1775, as one last sop to moderates, the Continental Congress would pass what came to be called the Olive Branch Petition. Drafted in part by Benjamin Franklin and sent to George III, it may have helped assure even the most vocal of those crying for independence that they had done all they could to avoid an all-out war. As the delegates did so, however, they also set forth a lengthy litany of every perceived British wrong to America since 1763. This Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms foreshadowed in every respect the more famous declaration that would be signed the following year. After the spring of 1775, the dreams of most patriots were unequivocally clear. No matter how difficult the road ahead, the only acceptable destination was independence and a new nation.

Those firebrands in the group did not have to worry about the king accepting the olive branch. George III remained as immovable on the subject of his royal prerogatives as he always had been. As the Olive Branch Petition was being debated an ocean away in Philadelphia, well before he learned the news from Bunker Hill, George III wrote the Earl of Sandwich thanking him for passing on letters from Major John Pitcairn about the Lexington and Concord action. “That officer’s conduct seems highly praiseworthy,” the king noted, not knowing that Pitcairn now lay dead. “I am of his opinion that when once those rebels have felt a smart blow, they will submit; and no situation can ever change my fixed resolution, either to bring the colonies to a due obedience to the legislature of the mother country or to cast them off!”²

THE EVENTS OF THE SPRING of 1775 shaped not just the future of a country that was in open rebellion but also the lives of its citizens, whether rebel, loyalist, or still trying to decide. A great many would live to see the result of what started on Lexington Green. Others would not.

Captain John Parker, who had done his duty by assembling his neighbors on Lexington Green, succumbed on September 17, 1775, to the consumption he was battling that April morning. Jemima Condict, who expressed such trepidation about matrimony, finally married her first cousin in 1779, when she was twenty-five. She died in childbirth later that year. Peter Salem was discharged from the Continental Army at the end of 1779 after almost five years of service. He married Katy Benson, built a cabin near Leicester, Massachusetts, and worked as a cane weaver. He died in poverty in Framingham in 1816. In one of history’s little ironies, John Derby, who had carried the news of Lexington and Concord to England on the Quero, brought the news of the Peace of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, to Boston in 1783 on board the twenty-gun privateer Astrea.

Of the three British major generals who arrived in Boston with so much swagger, all eventually came to grief in North America. William Howe abandoned Boston in March of 1776 and conducted inconclusive campaigns around New York and Philadelphia before resigning his command in 1777. John Burgoyne got his much-sought independent command but ended up surrendering his army at Saratoga in October of 1777. Henry Clinton succeeded Howe as commander in chief for North America in 1778, but aside from a campaign by sea against Charleston, South Carolina, he spent much of the war in New York, until Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781. Lord Percy served under Howe until 1777, when he became disillusioned with Howe’s conduct of the war. He resigned his command and returned to England, where he inherited his father’s dukedom.

As to the British army, never again in a principal battle during the American Revolution would they suffer as high a casualty rate—calculated as a percentage of those engaged—as they did at Bunker Hill, particularly among officers. Indeed, the British army would not suffer a defeat of similar proportions in North America until the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, when General Edward Pakenham seems to have forgotten the Battle of Bunker Hill and charged Andrew Jackson’s entrenched rabble across an open field.

Benjamin Franklin never reconciled with his loyalist son. He soon showed that any criticism of his reticence during the first few weeks of the Second Continental Congress was misplaced. After signing the Olive Branch Petition as a measure of continental unity, Franklin proceeded to resurrect his plan for Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which he had first proposed at Albany in 1754. “The suspicions against Dr Franklin have died away,” William Bradford assured James Madison. “Whatever was his design at coming over here, I believe he has now chosen his side, and favors our cause.”³ Franklin would soon return to Europe and mastermind the alliance with France that would ensure American independence.

Israel Putnam and William Prescott continued their military service, but their later exploits paled beside their actions—whether right or wrong—that night and day on Breed’s and Bunker Hills. Putnam held commands in the Hudson Valley before suffering a stroke in December of 1779, and Prescott commanded a regiment in the new Continental Army. Their descendants and supporters would long argue about who deserved the greater laurels.

John Stark, who arguably stopped an American rout at Bunker Hill, went on to play a prominent role in the Battle of Bennington, which led to Burgoyne’s isolation at Saratoga. Stark is one of the Granite State’s honorees in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol.

John Hancock presided over the Continental Congress until October of 1777. He routinely signed his name to acts first, and in large letters, but his most famous occasion for doing so would be the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Hancock returned to Massachusetts and spent liberally of his fortune to resurrect Boston from the depths into which it had fallen. In 1780, he was elected the first governor of Massachusetts.

About the only tribute that John Hancock did not garner was to become one of Massachusetts’s two honorees in Statuary Hall. That accolade went to Samuel Adams. There is ample evidence that Adams knew what he was getting into when he teamed up with Hancock, but in the end Adams came to resent Hancock’s ostentatious ways and expectations of deference. This did not keep him from serving as Hancock’s lieutenant governor for four years and then governor in his own right. One can only wonder whether Joseph Warren would have been his competition for Statuary Hall had Warren lived.

Architect though he later claimed to be of George Washington’s appointment as commander in chief, Samuel’s cousin John Adams became something of a critic as Washington parried one British military threat after another during the following years without achieving a knockout blow. In time, Adams would serve as Washington’s two-term vice president and then president himself for one term. Abigail Adams never shied away from speaking her mind, but women would wait until the Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1919, gave them the right to vote nationally—a right she thought they deserved in 1775.

After Joseph Warren died on Bunker Hill, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress elected James Warren its president. After losing a reelection bid in 1777, Warren eschewed other appointments and spent most of the war serving on the Continental Navy Board. When he died, in 1808, he and Mercy had been married fifty-four years.

Mercy Otis Warren continued writing poetry and satire and went on to complete a three-volume history of the Revolution. Published in 1805 under her own name, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution was the capstone of her career, but it was only marginally successful and caused a tiff with one of her earliest and biggest fans. John Adams took exception to some of her characterizations of his role, particularly assertions such as “His prejudices and passions were sometimes too strong for his sagacity and judgment.”⁴ She may well have been correct, but her candor did not sit well with her longtime friend. Eventually they reconciled.

The ultimate scoundrel, of course, proved to be Dr. Benjamin Church. The man whom many had once considered the insiders’ insider among the rebels was finally exposed as a traitor and a spy when a coded letter detailing rebel positions around Boston was intercepted and given to George Washington. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress arraigned Church on November 2, 1775. James Warren presided over his trial. As one patriot leader put it, “Dr. Church, who could have thought or even suspected it, a man who seemed to be all animation in the cause of his country.…”⁵ Tried and condemned, Church was imprisoned but then released on parole. He sailed from Boston in 1778, bound for exile on Martinique, on a ship that was never heard from again.

HAVING HEARD THE NEWS OF Bunker Hill in New York City while en route north from Philadelphia, General George Washington and his small staff continued toward Boston with growing trepidation. Washington’s military instincts told him that it was best to arrive in Cambridge as expeditiously as possible and take stock of the situation, but his political savvy was sensitive to the need to please the New England populace. Just the fact that a Virginian would ride into New England as commander in chief of the Continental Army—however understaffed and undersupplied—was a huge boost to morale. Massachusetts and its neighbors were not alone: the colonies north and south would indeed stand together.

So everywhere he went, George Washington graciously acknowledged the cheers: from Yale students in New Haven and from rebels at Springfield, Worcester, and Watertown. At Watertown, James Warren asked Washington to address a session of the Provincial Congress. Washington thanked the delegates “for your declaration of readiness, at all times, to assist me in the discharge of the duties of my station.”⁶

The next morning, July 2, Washington and his entourage, including General Charles Lee, rode the three miles into Cambridge. General Artemas Ward was waiting for him with far more relief than jealousy. Three days earlier, Ward had surreptitiously celebrated news of Washington’s pending arrival by making Washington and Virginia the challenge and countersign of the day. Ward also took pains to sharpen up the demeanor of his army. His orders demanded that barracks be swept clean and tidy, soldiers watch their language, and all lewd women be removed from camp.

Upon Washington’s arrival, around noon, Ward had planned a grand review, complete with twenty-one drummers and twenty-one fifers. There would not, however, be any salutes with musketry or cannons—the supply of gunpowder was far too short for that. But then the afternoon rains came. Before the assembled troops could pass in review, they were quickly dismissed so they could take shelter. They would try again the next day.

So, it was Monday, July 3, 1775, on a pleasant summer morning that General George Washington took formal command of the Continental Army in the field. Both astride his horse and standing before the assembled troops, he was easily recognizable by his height and his demeanor. He made a short speech that went largely unremembered and then took a small book from his pocket and read Psalm 101, including its second verse, which proclaims, “I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way.” There was little if any cheering, and except among those on the parade ground, little notice was taken of the new commander.⁷

Among the rank and file, George Washington was still an unproven commodity—a name but little else. It would take some time; it would call for all his determination, diplomacy, and faith; but in the end he would lead them to victory and ensure that the promise of this American spring was fulfilled.