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Tag: Bunker Hill

  • September 20, 1775: War for Sale

    Cover art for September 20, 1775: Detail of Romans' illustration of the Battle at Charlestown (Bunker Hill).

    Calling Bernard Romans a “Renaissance Man” wouldn’t be far from the truth, given his various talents and the fact that folks from that era were much more like people from the Renaissance than they are from modern times.

    Romans was a surveyor, a naturalist, an artist and an author. He was also an entrepreneur, which is what put him on our radar for today. And he was a ship’s captain, which meant that he had a front-row seat to the War for Independence.

    It was his  “An Exact View of the Late Battle at Charlestown, June 17th, 1775,” which he sold through a classified ad in a Philadelphia newspaper, that gave him great commercial success. Although many were sold then, few copies exist today and they’re worth nearly $70,000 in good shape.

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  • 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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