Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

Philbrick traces roughly twenty-seven months from the Boston Tea Party in December 1773 to the British evacuation of Boston in March 1776, centering his narrative on the city and on Joseph Warren, a young physician who became the most influential patriot leader in Massachusetts before his death at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He frames the book through a scene on June 17, 1775, when seven-year-old John Quincy Adams stood beside his mother Abigail on a hill in Braintree and watched the battle unfold. Warren, the family doctor who had once saved the boy's fractured forefinger from amputation, was killed in the fighting, and John Quincy Adams refused to attend anniversary celebrations for the rest of his life.

The narrative opens on December 16, 1773, when more than five thousand people packed the Old South Meetinghouse awaiting word on three ships of East India tea at Griffin's Wharf. After Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to let the tea leave, men disguised as Indians dumped it into the harbor. Philbrick traces the roots of colonial defiance back to the Puritan settlers of 1630, through decades of conflict and a growing conviction that Parliament had no authority over colonial affairs. The Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, and the Boston Massacre of 1770 had escalated tensions, and the Tea Act of 1773 gave patriots fresh grounds for resistance. Vigilante acts such as the brutal tarring and feathering of customs agent John Malcom helped convince Parliament that Boston must be severely punished.

In May 1774, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage arrived as the new royal governor and military commander, having rashly assured King George III that four regiments could contain Massachusetts. The Boston Port Act sealed the city from nearly all commerce until the destroyed tea was paid for. Samuel Adams, the gray-haired political mastermind of the patriot movement, pushed for a colony-wide boycott through the Committee of Correspondence, a patriot network coordinating resistance across the colonies. John Hancock, the wealthy public face of the movement, clashed with Gage and paradoxically elevated his standing among Bostonians. The Massachusetts Government Act then stripped the colony of its charter rights and banned regular town meetings, seeming to vindicate Adams's warnings about British tyranny.

During the summer of 1774, Joseph Warren emerged as one of the most active patriot voices. A widower with four children and a thriving medical practice, he wrote letters to towns across New England and began a romantic relationship with Mercy Scollay, a local woman who would become his fiancée. The countryside erupted against the Government Act: Mandamus councillors, officials appointed by the king to replace elected ones, were forced to resign or flee. In September, the Powder Alarm, a panic triggered when Gage sent soldiers to seize provincial gunpowder, sent tens of thousands of armed men streaming toward Boston. Warren rode to Cambridge and helped ensure the confrontation ended peacefully. The episode revealed that the country people, not Bostonians, were now leading the resistance.

In Philadelphia, the First Continental Congress endorsed Warren's Suffolk Resolves, which declared no obedience to the Coercive Acts (Parliament's punitive laws against Massachusetts) and outlined defensive preparations. The Provincial Congress, an extralegal patriot assembly governing outside royal authority, convened in Concord and stockpiled military supplies. Warren chaired the Committee of Safety, the patriot executive body overseeing military preparations. Henry Knox, a young patriot bookseller, alerted Paul Revere, a patriot courier and silversmith, that a spy was leaking secrets to Gage. The spy was Dr. Benjamin Church, a member of the patriot inner circle whose reports gave Gage accurate intelligence, including the Congress's requirement that only a British force exceeding five hundred men with artillery constituted a threat. This intelligence gave Gage a crucial advantage.

On the evening of April 18, 1775, Gage dispatched approximately seven hundred soldiers to destroy military stores in Concord, deliberately sending them without baggage or artillery. Warren, one of the last patriot leaders still in Boston, sent William Dawes, a patriot messenger, by land and Revere by boat to alert the countryside. At Lexington Green shortly after dawn, about 130 militiamen under Captain John Parker faced the approaching column. Shots were fired in the confusion, and eight militiamen were killed. At Concord's North Bridge, the British fired first, killing Captain Isaac Davis of Acton; the provincials returned fire and drove the regulars back. The march back to Lexington became a deadly gauntlet, with militiamen firing from behind stone walls and houses. Warren joined the fighting near Menotomy, where nearly half the day's casualties occurred. General Percy's relief brigade saved the retreating column, and the British reached Charlestown by evening.

Thousands of militiamen then surrounded Boston. The Provincial Congress elected Warren as president on April 22. He persuaded Connecticut's governor to stand with Massachusetts and sent Benedict Arnold, a patriot officer, to capture Fort Ticonderoga's artillery, providing gunpowder that Philbrick suggests might have been needed later at Bunker Hill. The provincial army grew unruly, and Warren warned Samuel Adams that without a proper government and commander in chief, military dictatorship might emerge.

On the evening of June 16, after intelligence revealed British interest in Dorchester Heights, the Committee of Safety authorized a preemptive fortification of the Charlestown peninsula. About twelve hundred soldiers under Colonel William Prescott built a redoubt on Breed's Hill instead of the larger Bunker Hill, directly facing the British fleet. On June 17, General William Howe led approximately 2,200 regulars across the harbor while Admiral Graves, commander of the British fleet, ordered Charlestown set ablaze. Colonel John Stark of New Hampshire positioned his men behind a stone wall at the water's edge; Prescott held the redoubt; General Israel Putnam directed forces on Bunker Hill. The three commanders operated without coordination. Howe's first two assaults collapsed under devastating provincial fire that targeted officers; at the beach, a British regiment was annihilated by Stark's volleys, while at the rail fence, an improvised barricade extending the American line, grenadiers were torn apart. On the third attempt, with their powder exhausted, the provincials threw stones and swung musket butts. Warren, elected major general days earlier, had arrived at the redoubt as a volunteer and covered the retreat until he was shot and killed. Of roughly 2,200 British engaged, 1,054 were killed or wounded, and the experience permanently altered Howe's willingness to engage the Americans.

George Washington arrived on July 2 as the new commander in chief appointed by the Continental Congress. A Virginia planter who had helped ignite the French and Indian War, he was disappointed by the undisciplined army he found and set about overhauling it, though his contempt for New Englanders strained relations. Severe gunpowder shortages and his council of war's repeated rejections stalled plans to attack Boston. Church was exposed as a spy, expelled from the army, and confined in Connecticut. Gage was recalled and replaced by Howe, who lacked ships to evacuate. Both sides endured a miserable winter.

In January 1776, Knox completed an extraordinary three-hundred-mile journey from Fort Ticonderoga, hauling sixty tons of artillery by ox-drawn sleds. General Artemas Ward, the provincial army's commander, persuaded the council of war to reject Washington's assault plan in favor of occupying Dorchester Heights. Engineer Rufus Putnam solved the problem of building on frozen ground using chandeliers, precut wooden scaffolds filled with fascines (bundled brush) and earth. On the night of March 4, three thousand soldiers erected two forts atop the Heights. The British could not elevate their cannons high enough to reach them. On March 17, the British army and approximately eleven hundred loyalists sailed for Halifax, ending an era that had begun with Boston's founding in 1630. Washington gradually accepted that his role was to build an army that could serve as the foundation for a new nation.

In the epilogue, Philbrick returns to John Quincy Adams, now seventy-five, who on June 17, 1843, refuses to attend the Bunker Hill Monument celebration. A fierce congressional opponent of slavery who had recently won the Amistad case before the Supreme Court, Adams regards the ceremony's speakers as morally compromised. As he watches the monument through the evening smoke, his memories of the battle merge with his unfinished work. He writes in his diary that his life must be militant to its close, and turns toward home, still carrying the fight the Revolution began.