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Tag: Battle of Bunker Hill

  • June 25, 1775: Peter Brown Saw It All

    Cover art for June 25, 1775: the gravestone of Peter and Olive Brown, in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. via Find-a-Grave.com.

    There are lots of times when historians have to pull a lot of small pieces together to get a decent picture of events. They use oddball clues such as artifacts in paintings to determine someone’s state of health, for instance. They have to take into account that published reports could be propaganda in nature.

    But once in a while, something turns up that was written more or less at the time it happened, and what’s more it was written by someone who doesn’t necessarily have an agenda.

    And in this case, nobody even knew it existed until a hundred years later. Exactly a hundred years later, in fact. A young soldier named Peter Brown wrote a letter to his mother just a few days after the Bunker Hill battle to tell her what happened. He spared few details and told a rather complete story of a couple of days’ worth of activity. And while he did mail the letter, and his mother did receive it, it mostly lay in family archives until 1875, when a descendant found it and realized that it might be important.

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    If you’re interested in seeing the letter itself, or reading a transcription, it’s available at the Massachusetts Historical Society’s website.

  • June 17, 1775: The Battle at Bunker Hill

    Cover art for June 17, 1775: The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill (detail) by John Trumbull, 1786.

    In the long run, the Battle at Bunker Hill Breed’s Hill was a tactical win for the British, but they incurred heavy losses and it took three tries to get that win.

    So why is it one of the battles that so many Americans seem to remember all these years later?

    We’re speculating here, but it’s possible that, between this battle and the ones at Lexington and Concord, the Colonial forces realized that this was a war that they could actually win: it wasn’t crazy at all to fight the British army. It almost didn’t matter that we didn’t win this one; the colonial militiamen could stand up against the British and force them to work much harder for their victories.

    There’s a scene in The Godfather, Part II in which Michael describes an incident he’d seen earlier in the day. He says he saw some Cuban rebels being rounded up by the soldiers, and one of them, rather than being taken prisoner, detontated a grenade on his person, taking a Captain of the Guard with him. From that he concluded that because the rebels weren’t getting paid to fight, they can actually win.

    That’s pretty much what happened here.

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  • March 5, 1775

    Cover art for March 5, 1775: Portrait of Joseph Warren by John Singleton Copley, 1765

    Joseph Warren’s life as a Patriot was rather brief (in fact his life overall was relatively short), but it was quite important to the cause. Warren was part of the committee that investigated the Boston Massacre, he sent Paul Revere on his midnight ride (just go with it for now), he wrote a song called “Free America,” which was based on a British melody called “The British Grenadiers”, he fought at Lexington and Concord, and he died at Bunker Hill.

    And he was one of only two men who was asked to speak more than once on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. And this second time was the one that really sold the crowd.

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  • February 14, 1775

    Cover art for February 14, 1775: Depiction by Percy Moran circa 1909 of British Grenadiers and Light Infantry scaling today's "Breed's Hill."

    When it comes to Black people and their role in the American Revolution, the one name that most people appear to remember is that of Crispus Attucks, largely because he was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, and that event is thought of as the beginning of the Revolutionary War, therefore it’s significant that the first person to die in the name of American freedom was a person of color.

    Other people, more fussy about events, would say that Lexington & Concord was the beginning of the war. The reasoning behind that is that it’s the first event in a series of hostile actions that took place close to one another. But the real argument is that most historical events of this nature don’t have definitive “beginning” and “ending” points; it’s much like a roll of paper towels. Sure, there are perforations marking each sheet, but you know for a fact that when you pull one off, it’s going to tear at an oddball angle and those perfectly rectangular sheets are a rarity.

    The fact is, however, that over 100 Black men fought as part of the militia in the opening battles of the Revolution. Here’s the story of one of the first.

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