Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

Part of what makes a revolution such a fascinating subject to study is the arrival of the moment when neutrality is no longer an option. Like it or not, a person has to choose.

“I see the clouds which now rise thick and fast upon our horizon,” Quincy said, “the thunders roll, and the lightnings play, and to that God who rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm I commit my country.”

At the corner of Essex on their left, they stopped at the huge old elm known as the Liberty Tree. A staff rose above the topmost portion of the tree, on which a flag was often flown. This was where the first protests against the Stamp Act had been held back in 1765, and in the years since, the Liberty Tree had become a kind of druidical, distinctly American shrine to the inherent freedoms of man and that Enlightenment sense of “the state of nature” that exists before a people willingly submit to the dictates of a government of their own choosing.

Copley wasn’t the only artist in Boston who had an uneasy relationship with the city’s patriots. Boston’s most widely known poet was a twenty-one-year-old African enslaved woman named Phillis Wheatley, whose first volume of poems had been published in England just the year before and was now being sold in the city’s many bookshops.

In the spring of 1774 legislators voted on yet another unsuccessful petition presented by “a great number of blacks of this province who by divine permission are held in a state of slavery within the bowels of a free and Christian country.”

By “divine permission”. Stomachs turning.

Hutchinson, sixty-two, had come to represent all that the patriots claimed was wrong with the British Empire. In reality, he was far more sympathetic to the plight of provincial Massachusetts than his enemies ever allowed. Back in 1765 he had privately criticized the Stamp Act; he had also had reservations about many of the ministry’s subsequent actions.

said there was no more justice left in Britain than there was in hell—that I wished for war. . . . Such flights of passion, such starts of imagination, though they may [impress] a few of the fiery and inconsiderate, yet they lower, they sink a man.”

America had been founded by immigrants who, little thanks to their mother country, had made a life for themselves in a distant land. And now the mother country wanted to assert her right to control the descendants of those immigrants.

Through the medium of the Committees of Correspondence, Samuel Adams and his compatriots had created what was, in essence, an extralegal, colony-wide network of communication that threatened to preempt the old hierarchical form of government.

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The Massachusetts Government

the Administration of Justice Act,

the Quartering Act,

and finally the Quebec Act, which, besides allowing French Canadians to practice Catholicism (not a popular provision among New England’s papist-hating Congregationalists), expanded that province all the way to the Ohio River to the south and to the Mississippi to the west. Many leading colonists, especially in Pennsylvania and Virginia, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, had applied for land grants in this huge swath of territory, which included modern Ohio and Illinois. By effectively prohibiting western expansion, Parliament had found a way—unrelated to the unrest in Boston—to anger and frustrate not just the citizens of Massachusetts but virtually all of colonial America.

were collectively referred to as the Coercive Acts

Native New Englanders (thanks to a healthier diet and living conditions) were statistically two inches taller than their European counterparts.

The regulars represented one of the greatest armies in Europe, but this did not change the fact that the last time any of them had been in combat was more than twelve years before;

At the root of the patriots’ misguided optimism was their continued confidence in George III. The fiction they all clung to was that once the king saw for himself how his ministers had misled him, he would withdraw the troops and the demand for unjust taxes and allow New England to remain forever free.