Detail of The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, 17 June, 1775, by John Trumbull, 1786(Public Domain/Wikimedia)
For one bloody day, New England militia were the nation’s first army.
Revolutions don’t become so overnight. It was a long, escalating spiral from the Stamp Act riots in October and November of 1765 to the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. After a decade of mayhem, property destruction, and nervous soldiers firing into a crowd, the rebellion broke into gunfire between British regulars and American militia at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Over a hundred men died, and nearly 15 percent of the British troops engaged were killed or wounded. But the fighting at Lexington and Concord was unplanned on both sides, resulting in disorderly skirmishing. Ethan Allen’s capture of Fort Ticonderoga a month later, on May 10, was a surprise raid without fatalities.
But the Battle of Bunker Hill, this day 250 years ago, was war, in all of its ghastly glory and horror. Anyone lucky enough to live through it knew it as a battle. One British officer wrote later that “that day will never be out of my mind till the day of my death.” It had crucial significance, both strategically and psychologically, for the rest of a war that lasted over six more years. American independence — not yet even the goal of the fighting — would become possible due to what happened that day. And yet, it was the strangest of American battles: the largest and most consequential pitched battle in American history to be fought entirely by amateur volunteer militia without national armed forces on the field.
Too Few Good Men
War began when Thomas Gage, the Boston-based royal governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief of British forces in America, received orders from London to send an expedition into the countryside to seize patriot arms and leaders (including John Hancock and Samuel Adams) in Lexington and Concord. Gage was hesitant to pick a fight because he felt he needed more men. Subsequent events proved him correct.
One of the myths of the American Revolution is the might of the British Army. The myth is not just an anachronism; in the aftermath of Britain’s crushing 1763 defeat of France in the Seven Years War (here the French and Indian War), American and British sources of the day spoke of the redcoats as the greatest army in the world. Qualitatively, that was debatable; the victory over France, then a nation with more than triple Britain’s population, came with the help of Frederick the Great’s excellent Prussian army and, more importantly, the aid of the superior British Royal Navy. By April 1775, over a decade removed from that war, most of the infantrymen stationed in Massachusetts had never seen combat, although many of their officers had. Several patriot militia officers had combat experience from that war, too, which had disabused them of the mystique of the superiority of the redcoats to American militia.
Man-for-man quality aside, the weakness of the British Army was in its small numbers, a product of the traditional British resistance to standing armies — and to the taxes needed to sustain them, which is why Parliament kept trying to foist the costs of deployments on the colonists. At the outbreak of the Revolution, “The total land forces of Great Britain, exclusive of militia, numbered on paper 48,647 men, of which 39,294 were infantry, 6,869 cavalry, and 2,484 artillery.” The army was a quarter of its wartime size in 1763, and while that number did not include the East India Company’s troops in India, it had other restive fronts to cover, such as Ireland.
Estimates of actual troop strength in the American colonies at the start of 1775 scarcely exceeded 7,000 men, of whom 4,000 were in Massachusetts. The 13 Colonies had a population of over 2.1 million people — a little over a third of the population of England and Wales, albeit including a significant population of slaves who could not count toward potential colonial manpower. Military control of the colonies was a brittle reed. The sparsity of troops outside of Massachusetts explains how other colonies were free to send militia streaming toward Boston once the shooting started. In fact, there would never be many more than 15,000 redcoats in the North American theater at any point in the war. British forces topped 25,000 men by 1778, only by supplementing them with German mercenaries and Loyalist militia.
Parliament in early 1775 had voted Gage a few thousand more men, with the aim of bringing the Boston garrison up to about 6,000. He said he needed 32,000 men, and pleaded for a force large enough to avoid a protracted struggle: “If you think ten thousand men sufficient, send twenty. If one million is thought enough, give two. You will save both blood and treasure in the end.” Parliament did the opposite. In lieu of a larger infantry force, King George III sent Gage three newly minted major generals: William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne, who disembarked on May 25. They had been selected from 119 candidates as the cream of the British crop. Arriving on the too-aptly-named HMS Cerberus, they would prove (along with Gage and later Lord Cornwallis) a highly dysfunctional command structure.
Meanwhile, the Second Continental Congress, convening May 10, came to the opposite conclusion: If the disparate American militias were going to fight, they needed a single commander and a single army. On June 14 in Philadelphia, Congress created the Continental Army. The next day, it voted on a commander. While Hancock hoped for the post, Sam Adams and his cousin John both nominated George Washington, who brought the national stature of a Virginian as well as (unlike Hancock) extensive French and Indian War experience. Hancock announced the selection publicly on the morning of June 16. But as of the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Continental Army’s only soldier was Washington, and he was 300 miles away. He would not reach the militia encampment in Cambridge, Mass., until July 2, and Congress only formally incorporated the militias into the Continental Army on July 4, 1775.
A Hill to Die On
Boston’s geography was crucial to why and how the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought. It was quite different in 1775 from the city’s layout today, after much of the harbor had been filled in with land.
At the time, Boston was the center of three peninsulas in the harbor, connected to the mainland only by a narrow isthmus, the Neck. After the battered British expeditionary force returned from Lexington and Concord, both sides sufficiently barricaded the Neck so that the patriots could not get in, and the redcoats could not get out. To the north was the smaller peninsula of Charlestown, also connected to the mainland only by a thin neck. Cambridge was inland, west of Charlestown. The southern peninsula, Dorchester, was dominated by the imposing Dorchester Heights, 112 feet high and steep. With a wider connection to the mainland, Dorchester required a larger force to secure.
Near the Charlestown neck was Bunker Hill. Occupying it would command the peninsula. On June 12, Gage declared martial law. At the same time, the British command hatched a plan to take Bunker Hill, followed by securing the Dorchester Heights. But the patriot militia, as usually happened in Boston, got intelligence of what the British were planning, and dug in overnight on June 16. Like the British, they prioritized Charlestown first. Farmers in the age before mechanization were especially good at swiftly digging entrenchments; by the time of the battle in mid-afternoon on June 17, they had constructed a six-foot-high square earthwork redoubt.
Major General Artemas Ward, the Massachusetts militia leader who had assumed overall command, ordered Colonel William Prescott, a veteran of the French and Indian War, to take 1,200 men and seize Bunker Hill. But instead, after conferring with two grizzled fellow veterans of that war — Major General Israel Putnam and Colonel Richard Gridley — Prescott decided to put his main body to work building a redoubt to control Breed’s Hill, which was further south on the peninsula and (unlike Bunker Hill) overlooked the water approaches to Boston. Bunker Hill was an excellent defensive position, but Breed’s Hill was an offensive position threatening the British capacity to resupply Boston by sea.
The reasoning for this decision has never been explained, but it accords with the aggressive nature of the men who made it. Prescott had reportedly vowed never to be taken alive, and his loyalist brother-in-law told Gage, “Colonel Prescott will fight you to the gates of hell.” The 57-year-old Putnam, a Connecticut farmer so suspicious he was rumored to sleep with one eye open, was legendary for his feats of daring and endurance, from surviving a shipwreck in Cuba and capture and torture by Native Americans to killing a wolf in its den. He had been a key right-hand man for Richard Rogers of the famed Rogers’ Rangers during the previous war. The barely literate Putnam was described by Silas Deane as “totally unfit for everything but fighting.” When he heard of Lexington and Concord the day after the battle, Putnam literally dropped his plow in his field to join the fight.
As historian Rick Atkinson observed, “Dawn, that great revealer of predicaments, had fully disclosed Colonel Prescott’s.” Gage immediately concluded that an American position on Breed’s Hill was intolerable. Indeed, Clinton — often the sharpest and most aggressive of the British generals — had witnessed the Americans building the redoubt and argued for dislodging them at dawn. They had no reliable information about how many Americans were there or how many reinforcements were nearby in reserve, but the British command knew that the Breed’s Hill position would only get stronger unless it was either immediately dislodged or encircled and blockaded from resupply. With provisions in Boston already tight and an eye on the fluid morale of rebellions, Gage was unwilling to hazard a long standoff. He would fight, and fight today.
At the British war council, Clinton proposed a daring plan that looks like the better course with hindsight: Land 500 men on the Charlestown Neck to cut off Prescott’s retreat and prevent reinforcements (a plan that would have been impossible had the patriots entrenched on Bunker Hill). Gage, however, worried that Clinton’s force would be unable to land artillery in the shallow muck or receive adequate naval support, and could be caught in a vise if colonial reinforcements pressed him from the mainland. Instead, he assigned Howe to land with 1,500 men on the beaches in front of Breed’s Hill and flank the patriots on the American left. There would be as many as 2,600 British troops available. Attacking on two sides would avoid the hazards of a pure frontal assault, which had led the British to a bloody disaster against the French at Fort Carillon in 1758.
That was the idea, anyway.
The Whites of Their Eyes
Nothing went right for the British. Howe discovered that his field artillery had brought the wrong size cannonballs (a planning failure that would be echoed 40 years later when the British at New Orleans showed up without scaling ladders). The Royal Navy’s bombardment was unable to reach the American positions with more than harassing fire, although they did succeed in incinerating Charlestown, destroying hundreds of homes and barns. The British infantry, carrying 50 pounds of equipment and fighting in red wool uniforms, broiled in the hot sun. The area chosen for the flanking attack turned out to have waist-high uncut grass full of concealed fencing and other obstacles, while the Americans were positioned behind a rail fence that helped stabilize their fire.
The Americans had their own problems. The redoubt had no positions for firing artillery, of which they had little anyway. Given the limited range of their muskets and almost complete lack of artillery, the Americans didn’t contest Howe’s landing, which took six hours to await high tide and unload 1,500 men from longboats by 2 p.m. — although the time did allow the Americans to build more entrenchments and obstacles. As the battle commenced, the militia were never able to get reserves into place, leading critics of Putnam to snipe afterwards, “There never was more confusion and less command.” Washington, always a skeptic of militia, concluded that better command would have won the battle.
But this was a completely amateur army of unconnected Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island militia, sniffily dismissed by Burgoyne as a “rabble in arms.” What it did succeed in accomplishing was remarkable. Throughout the war, militia would show themselves poorly suited for offensive maneuvers or amphibious landings, but they could be highly effective defending fixed positions. If their leaders were not great military minds, they rallied the men’s morale; the 6-foot-3 Prescott stood ramrod-straight and unflappable even when his uniform was splattered with blood and brains, and ended up being nearly the last man off the field. Prescott and Putnam probably didn’t coin the phrase, “Don’t fire, boys, until you see the whites of their eyes” that day, and may or may not have said it, but it reflected the advice that the American commanders sent up and down the line.
The British soldiers described running into “a continual sheet of lightning” and “an uninterrupted peal of thunder.” The first American volley cut so brutally through the redcoats that it took Howe half an hour to reform his lines to renew the attack. Twice they came, and twice they were repelled. Major John Pitcairn, the British hero of Lexington and Concord, fell with four bullets in him and was carried from the field by his son. Howe’s aide-de-camp was killed, and his entire staff was dead or wounded, but the general himself was unharmed in the thick of the action. A more seasoned force might have taken Breed’s Hill by bayonet charge in spite of the American fire, but with so many officers cut down, the infantry was hard to rally. Only on the third attempt did the British finally take Breed’s Hill, and only because the Americans ran out of ammunition.
Even as they turned to flee, the Americans managed to withdraw without a complete rout. Burgoyne observed, “The retreat was no flight. It was even covered with bravery and military skill.” Howe restrained Clinton from continuing the pursuit; Ward restrained Prescott from trying to retake the hill. The battle had lasted three hours. Britain had taken Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill.
The Field of Blood
When it was all over, out of 2,300 men engaged at Bunker Hill, the British had suffered 1,054 casualties (226 men killed in action and 828 wounded) — more than twice the American losses out of an overall force of similar size. That meant that casualties amounted to:
- Half of the British engaged, including a shocking (for the time) 40 percent casualty rate for officers. Most of the wounded officers had been shot three or four times.
- A quarter of the entire British troop strength in Massachusetts at the start of 1775.
- Over 10 percent of all British troops were in North America.
- More than one out of 50 men in the entire British Army.
As Nathanael Greene remarked, “I wish we could sell them another hill, at the same price.” Washington added, “A few more such victories would put an end to their army.” Howe commented, “The success is too dearly bought;” he and other British officers reached immediately for the famous lament of King Pyrrhus that another such victory would undo him. Gage, enraged at the ungentlemanly targeting of his officers, threw captured American officers in common jails, later telling Washington, “I acknowledge no rank that is not derived from the king.”
Clinton, sensing the American disorder, urged Gage the next day to take the Dorchester Heights, arguing that it was “absolutely necessary for the security of Boston.” But Gage felt that the carnage had been too great to press any advantage without reinforcements. His report to Parliament was so gloomy that he was immediately sacked. The Cabinet promptly voted to send 2,000 more men to Boston, but they would take months to arrive, and the moment passed. It was on the Dorchester Heights that Henry Knox would place the artillery of Fort Ticonderoga in March 1776, forcing the British to evacuate Boston. The men who died taking the hills had died for nothing.
Over the Hill
The battle was cheered by Americans, and rightly so. They had shown that Lexington and Concord were not just flukes caused by the element of surprise; American militia had faced down British regulars and bled them white. But Congress went too far in the direction of irrational exuberance following what had, after all, been an American defeat. The day that news arrived of the battle, Congress voted to authorize an invasion of Canada, which would end with a disastrous effort to besiege the fortified Quebec City in a driving snow on New Year’s Eve.
One costly loss for the American side was Doctor Joseph Warren, a bright, charismatic 33-year-old leader who might well have gone on to a prominent career as a statesman. Foolishly, the widowed father of four, a physician with no military training, was swept away with patriotic fervor and insisted on serving as a regular infantryman, finely dressed and carrying a borrowed gun. He was shot in the face at close range during the battle’s closing moments, a death later immortalized in a famous painting by John Trumbull. Henceforth, the Revolution’s political leaders would leave the fighting to the soldiers.
Gage, desperate for men, had concluded even before the battle that he would need “even to raise the Negroes in our cause. . . . Hanoverians, Hessians, perhaps Russians.” George III would later ask Catherine the Great to send Cossacks to fill the gap in British manpower. The Americans, by contrast, were slower to take the lesson: Black soldiers such as Peter Salem (who was credited with killing Pitcairn), who distinguished themselves in the battle, were not yet enough to convince Washington and other non-New England commanders that the army should enlist non-white troops.
Bunker Hill’s importance went beyond its immediate effects on American morale and its strategic role in the ultimate British evacuation of Boston. The carnage was deeply traumatizing to the British officer corps and infected their tactics with more caution for the remainder of the war. Clinton, whose aggressive ideas were regularly overruled, sat on his hands in New York later in the war while Burgoyne was defeated at Saratoga and Cornwallis was defeated at Yorktown.
From July 1775 on, the starring role in the American Revolution would be played by Washington’s Continental Army. But the “Father of our Country” had adopted his army from the militia. The militia could not win America its independence. But at Bunker Hill, it made that fight possible.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.
Reprinted with permission from National Review by Dan McLaughlin.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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