Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

  The fire from the three arrow-shaped fleches between the breastwork and the rail fence proved particularly lethal to the grenadiers, especially since Captain Trevett, the only American artillery officer to distinguish himself that day, was there with a cannon. Several Connecticut soldiers insisted that at one point General Putnam was also in the vicinity with a cannon of his own. Having watched in outrage as two artillery officers abandoned their fieldpieces on Bunker Hill, Putnam convinced Captain John Ford, the same officer who had killed five regulars on the Battle Road on April 19, to help haul one of the cannons down to the front lines. There, Putnam assisted in firing the fieldpiece, using a ladle to jam powder from the oversize cartridge down the barrel. When a particularly effective shot tore into the regulars’ ranks, one provincial soldier was heard to shout, “You have made a furrow through them!”

  Up until this point, the fighting at the redoubt had been relatively light. The provincial sharpshooters who had formerly occupied houses in Charlestown had moved to a stone barn farther up the hill, and not until General Pigot had eliminated this annoying threat on his left could he turn his full attention to the redoubt. However, Prescott’s men, standing behind the fort’s earthen walls, had already fired enough times to cause deep concern about the supply of gunpowder. Prescott resolved that the next time the regulars attacked, he would wait until they were within just thirty yards before he allowed his men to fire.

  As the muskets inside the redoubt ceased firing, Pigot may have become convinced that Prescott’s men had abandoned the fortification, an impression that was reinforced the closer his soldiers approached without any enemy fire. Inside the redoubt, the tension mounted as the regulars threatened to surround them in an annihilating rush. According to one account, Prescott and his officers ran across the top of the redoubt, knocking up the muzzles of the men’s muskets to prevent them from firing too early. “[The regulars] advanced toward us in order to swallow us up,” Peter Brown wrote, “[but] they found a choky mouthful of us.”

  When Prescott finally gave the order to fire, the regulars were almost upon them. “We gave them such a hot fire,” he wrote, “that they were obliged to retire nearly 150 yards before they could rally and come again to the attack.” A British officer put it another way: “On the left Pigot was staggered and actually retreated.”

  But it was Howe, standing all alone at the rail fence, who felt the full devastating brunt of what had just transpired in the hills overlooking the still raging flames of Charlestown. His aide-de-camp had been killed at his side; by the time he reached the provincial line, every member of his staff was either dead or wounded; even the bottle of wine held by his servant had been shattered by a musket ball. Both the provincials and Howe’s own regulars looked on in astonishment as he stood there, resplendent in his scarlet uniform, a seemingly unmissable target for the rebel sharpshooters. Given the effectiveness of the provincial fire, one can only wonder how the British leader managed to remain unhurt. “For a near minute,” one of his officers marveled, “he was quite alone.”

  Surrounded by the dead and the dying, having learned that the light infantry who were to have assured him of a victory had been, in his own words, “repulsed,” Howe experienced what proved to be a life-altering sensation. Writing to a friend in England, he admitted, “There was a moment I have never felt before.”

  For an officer of Howe’s experience and temperament, it was a startling revelation. Staggered by grief, anger, shock, and embarrassment, he turned and started down the hill, picking his way through the bodies of the dead, considering what to do next.

  —

  Howe had a decision to make. Should he try it once again—could he try it once again? Additional reinforcements must be ordered from Boston. A change of strategy was also required. Instead of a line, he would attack in columns. Instead of focusing on the rail fence, he would direct his energies against the redoubt and breastwork. The fleche-punctuated gap provided the opportunity to position his artillery so that the cannons raked the men behind the breastwork. He must act quickly before the provincial soldiers gathered on Bunker Hill had a chance to reinforce the rebel lines. As a final touch, the regulars were ordered to dispense with their packs and other unnecessary equipment.

  Despite all that they had so far suffered, the British soldiers were impatient for one last try at the provincials. “Push on! Push on!” was the cry among the grenadiers. And so they began once again, with Howe at their head, “distinguished . . . by his figure and gallant bearing.” Instead of a long line across the hillside, they advanced toward the breastwork and redoubt in a column of eight men across. One provincial soldier estimated that there was about twelve feet between each man at the head of the column while behind them the soldiers were “very close after one another in extraordinary deep files.” The depth of the column meant that no matter how many British soldiers the provincials killed, there always seemed to be more to replace them. “As fast as the front man was shot down,” a provincial wrote, “the next stepped forward into place, but our men dropped them so fast they were a long time coming up. It was surprising how they would step over their dead bodies, as though they were logs of wood.”

  The discipline and bravery of the British soldiers—who were heard to shout, “Fight, conquer, or die!”—was a terrifying wonder to behold, but the artillery, repositioned on the right and firing grapeshot, was what began to change the course of the battle. The minister over on the eastern shore of the Mystic River was well placed to see the devastation wreaked by the British cannons on the provincials standing behind the breastwork, who were forced, he wrote, “to retire within their little fort.”

  Prescott’s force inside the redoubt gained by this sudden inflow of desperate men, but as the breastwork was abandoned, the grenadiers were given the toehold they needed to begin to work their way around the fort from the east. Stark at the rail fence was tempted to move his men toward the redoubt in an attempt to thwart this portion of the British advance, but soon realized that given the cannonading of the breastwork, such a move would be virtual suicide. Instead, Stark decided to reposition his men, who had at that moment no British to fight, to help cover what was beginning to look like an inevitable provincial retreat.

  In the meantime, the grenadiers led by General Pigot were working their way toward the other side of the redoubt. Even though they were in danger of becoming surrounded, Prescott’s men remained in high spirits. “The regulars were no longer invincible in their eyes,” Prescott’s son wrote. Their biggest concern was their low supplies of ammunition. Somewhere on the dirt floor of the redoubt someone found an abandoned artillery cartridge. They ripped it open and began distributing the powder to the men positioned at the walls as Prescott exhorted them “not to waste a kernel of it, but to make it certain that every shot should tell.” A few of the provincials had bayonets, and Prescott positioned them “where he considered the wall most likely to be scaled.”

  Not until the British were within fifteen yards did Prescott allow his men to fire. “The fire on our left wing was so hot that our troops broke,” a British officer later wrote. But unlike the previous time, there was no wholesale retreat. Once again the officers received the highest losses. One company of grenadiers lost both its captain and a lieutenant. As his men lay on the grass, musket balls blasting the dirt all around them, the sergeant turned to the remaining privates and said, “You now see, my lads, that our brave captain is greatly wounded and the lieutenant killed; now I have the honor to command you; therefore let us get into the trenches as fast as possibly we can, for we must conquer or die.”

  Every officer of any experience said that the rebel fire was the worst they’d ever known. One marine captain turned to Major Pitcairn, the officer who had watched helplessly as the firing had begun on Lexington Green two months before, and said that “of all the actions he had been in this was the hottest: first from the burning of the houses of Charlestown; next the heat of
the day, and thirdly from the heat of the enemy’s fire.” Pitcairn told him to quit talking about the heat and to attack the redoubt.

  Pinned down by the provincial fire behind a stone wall and some trees, Adjutant John Waller, “half mad with standing in this situation and doing nothing,” tried to organize his men for a final assault on the redoubt. “We were now in confusion after being broke several times in getting over rails, etc.,” he wrote. He needed to get his men to stop firing their muskets and prepare for a bayonet charge. “I ran from right to left and stopped our men from firing,” he wrote. “[And] when we had got in tolerable order, we rushed on, leaped the ditch, and climbed the parapet, under a most sore and heavy fire.” During this mad dash toward the redoubt Major Pitcairn took a musket ball to the chest. It proved to be a mortal wound, and Waller later wrote of “the irreparable loss of poor Major Pitcairn.”

  Waller wasn’t the only one leading the charge onto the parapet. Captain George Harris of the Fifth Foot had spent much of May and early June tending a vegetable garden he and his servant had planted beside their tent on Boston Common. In just six weeks, the garden had produced what he described to his cousin in England as “such salads.” He was particularly enthusiastic about the “excellent greens the young turnip-tops make. Then the spinach and radishes, with the cucumbers, beans, and peas so promising.” Now Harris was at the base of the fort, trying to get his men to follow him up onto the top of the parapet. After two tries, he finally succeeded in getting them to come with him as he mounted the wall, only to be met by the muzzle of a musket. “The ball grazed the top of my head,” he wrote, “and I fell deprived of sense and motion into the arms of Lord Rawdon.” Lieutenant Rawdon, twenty, an Irish lord dressed in a circular cap made of cat fur, ordered four soldiers to carry their commander to safety despite Harris’s mumbled plea to “let me die in peace.” As soon as the soldiers carrying Harris ventured beyond the wall of the redoubt, they found themselves back in the provincials’ line of fire, and three of them were wounded (one mortally) by the time they’d carried their captain down the hill.

  Repeating the mantra “Conquer or die,” the grenadiers continued to climb up onto the redoubt. “At the first onset,” Henry Dearborn wrote, “every man that mounted the parapet was cut down by the troops within who had formed on the opposite side not being prepared with bayonets to meet a charge.” For the regulars it was a terrible and very personal loss of life. “Archy Campbell . . . fell,” John Waller wrote, “poor Ellis also on this fatal spot . . . Shea received also his mortal wound here and Chudleigh Ragg and Dyer were also wounded.” Only after the fighting did Waller begin to grieve; “In the heat of the action,” he wrote, “I thought nothing of the matter.” Lieutenant Rawdon had difficulty believing that the Yankees had not yet begun to retreat. “There are few instances of regular troops defending a redoubt till the enemy were in the very ditch of it,” he wrote, “and [yet] I can assure you that I myself saw several pop their heads up and fire even after some of our men were upon the berm,” the point between the ditch and the rampart.

  Eventually, however, Prescott’s men ran out of powder. “We fired till our ammunition began to fail,” one provincial remembered, “then our firing began to slacken—and at last it went out like an old candle.” The floor of the redoubt was filled with stones, which the men took up and hurled at the regulars, who were now coming over the rampart, one provincial remembered, “with their guns in their left hand and their swords in their right.” Ebenezer Bancroft had a single charge left, but before he could get off what he estimated to be his twenty-seventh shot, “an officer sprang over the breastwork and presented his piece.” Bancroft had just finished loading his musket. He threw away the rammer and, in his own words, “instantly placed the muzzle . . . against [the regular’s] right shoulder, a little below the collarbone, and fired, and he fell into the trench.” Bancroft was convinced that he had killed Major Pitcairn, but that honor appears to have been won by Salem Poor, a free African American.

  As the redoubt filled up with a chaotic mixture of British and American soldiers, Prescott realized that he must order a retreat. At this point Joseph Warren was said to have demonstrated great bravery, exhibiting, one provincial wrote, “a coolness and conduct which did honor to the judgment of his country in appointing him a major-general.” With their gunpowder expended, some of the provincials grabbed the still-warm barrels of their muskets and began swinging them like clubs. The roiling dust and smoke inside the redoubt made it difficult to see, and one provincial told how he was “obliged to feel about for the outlet.” Those who couldn’t find the sally port simply climbed over the redoubt’s walls and did their best to flee. Those who were unable to escape quickly fell victim to what Adjutant Waller described as the grenadiers’ “rage and ferocity.” “I cannot pretend to describe the horror of the scene within the redoubt . . . ,” he continued, “’twas streaming with blood and strewed with dead and dying men, the soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the brains of the others. . . . We tumbled over the dead to get at the living, who were crowding out of the gorge of the redoubt.”

  After shooting the British officer with his last charge of gunpowder, Ebenezer Bancroft realized it was time to get out of the fort. He was particularly proud of his musket, “a venerable one,” that he’d “taken from the French” during the war in Canada. Holding the musket “broadside before my face,” he rushed into the mass of regulars ahead of him and then “leaped upon the heads of the throng in the gateway.” Punching and kicking his way out of the redoubt, he finally broke free and with “a shower of shot falling all around me . . . ran down the hill.” He lost a forefinger to a musket ball but eventually made it back to Cambridge alive.

  Watching from Boston’s Beacon Hill, the loyalist Samuel Paine “heard the shouts of the British army whom we now saw entering the breastworks and soon they entered and a most terrible slaughter began upon the rebels who now were everyone shifting for himself.” Thomas Sullivan wrote that the provincial forces were “so thick and numerous in the works that they maybe justly compared to a swarm of bees in a beehive. Our brave men ran through with their bayonets, such of them as had not time to run away.”

  Colonel Prescott was one of the last out of the redoubt. Surrounded by the enemy, he had, his son wrote, “several passes with the bayonet made at his body, which he parried with his sword.” By the time he exited the redoubt, his banyan and waistcoat had been “pierced in several places, but he escaped unhurt.”

  Warren may have left the fort even after Prescott, who had no knowledge of what eventually happened to the provincial leader. Some later claimed that not wanting to be taken alive, Warren actively sought death. But if that were the case, it’s difficult to understand why he died with several incriminating letters in his pocket from Bostonians sympathetic to the provincial cause. It’s just as likely that, caught up in the considerable heat of the moment, he took it upon himself to cover, as best he could, the retreat of his compatriots. By this time in the battle he’d acquired a sword, which he waved in the air as he “endeavored to rally the militia.” About sixty yards from the redoubt, he was “bravely defending himself against several opposing regulars” when he was recognized by an officer. The officer’s servant impulsively took up a pistol and “in a cowardly manner” shot Warren in the face, the ball entering just below his left eye and exiting through the back of his head.

  —

  Not until the next morning did General Howe discover that Joseph Warren was dead. By that time the British had succeeded in flushing the provincials from the Charlestown peninsula. Israel Putnam, so unsuccessful at digging an entrenchment on Bunker Hill, had spent the night overseeing work on nearby Prospect Hill to the west. Prescott, after bitterly asking Putnam why he had not provided the promised support, assured the ever fretful General Ward that “the enemy’s confidence would not be increased by the result of the battle.” The Americans had lost 115 killed and had 305 wounded, wit
h most of the casualties occurring during the retreat. Of the approximately 2,200 British soldiers in the battle, close to half—1,054—had been killed or wounded. The British had been victorious, but as Howe wrote, “The success is too dearly bought.”

  Despite the heavy losses, Howe’s men still held their leader in high esteem. “All the soldiers are charmed with General Howe’s gallant behavior,” an officer wrote. Only slightly injured in the foot, he somehow managed to survive a battle that by all rights should have killed him. And yet he had not emerged unscathed from the bloody carnage on Breed’s Hill. As Charles Lee later wrote, “The sad and impressive experience of this murderous day sunk deep into the mind of Sir William Howe.”

  When he learned on the morning of June 18 that Joseph Warren had been killed, Howe expressed disbelief that a man of Warren’s political stature had dared to subject himself to the risks of this terrible battle. He asked John Jeffries, the doctor who had met with Warren on the docks of the North End just a week before, to verify that the body, which had been stripped of its beautiful clothes, did indeed belong to Warren. Jeffries remembered that Warren had “lost a fingernail and wore a false tooth,” and after examining the body, he confirmed that this was indeed Joseph Warren. Howe shook his head in wonder and said that “this victim was worth five hundred of their men.” For a general who had just suffered more than a thousand casualties in less than an hour and a half, this was high praise indeed.