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Thus, the Battle of Bunker Hill is the critical turning point in the story of how a rebellion born in the streets of Boston became a countrywide war for independence.
The evacuation of the British in March 1776 signaled the beginning of an eight-year war that produced a new nation.
Boston in the 1770s was a land-connected island with a population of about fifteen thousand, all of whom probably recognized, if not knew, each other.
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.
Their projected “city on a hill” was to be a shining example of what could be accomplished when men and women lived according to the true dictates of God beyond the reach of the Stuart kings and their bishops.
A hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the governor of Massachusetts boldly insisted that the laws enacted by the colony’s legislature superseded those of even Parliament.
This gave the patriots ideological grounds on which to object to an act that might otherwise have been viewed as a windfall for the colonial consumer.
Collective violence had been a long-standing part of colonial New England, a trait the English settlers had brought from the mother country. Crowds tended to intervene when government officials acted against the interests of the people.
the divide between a civic-minded crowd and an unruly and vindictive mob was frighteningly thin.
Tarring and feathering went back centuries to the time of the crusades, and was also applied to the effigies used during Pope Night; a few Boston loyalists before him had been tarred and feathered, but none could claim the level of suffering that Malcom was about to endure.
It had been a brutal, even obscene display of violence, but the people of Boston had spoken.
In fact, he and other patriot leaders disapproved of this spontaneous and entirely unscripted outbreak of violence.
When you looked at a Copley portrait, you felt as if the subject was there for all time, frozen in an eternal now.
country.” As these petitioners knew all too well, what Phillis Wheatley called the “strange absurdity” of American slavery was not limited to the South.
On March 28, one member of the House of Commons acknowledged that “the Americans were a strange set of people, and that it was in vain to expect any degree of reasoning from them; that instead of making their claim by argument, they always chose to decide the matter by tarring and feathering.”
Boston must suffer the worst of all punishments for its collective and apparently ongoing sins.
Boston was now the victim of a more-than-decade-old plot on the part of the British ministry to enslave America, to drain this bounteous land of all her resources so that England, an island lost to luxury and corruption, could sustain the fraudulent lifestyle to which it had become accustomed.
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.
Rather than approaching the act as a problem to be solved, they saw it as an opportunity to be exploited.
Instead of compliance, they wanted nothing less than a complete boycott of British goods—not just in Boston and Massachusetts but throughout all thirteen colonies.
It now seemed as if everything Samuel Adams had predicted was about to come true. By August, when the Government Act went into effect, every town in Massachusetts would be deprived of its liberties.
The woman responded a day or so later with a flirtatious poem of 114 lines titled “On Female Vanity” that Thomas published anonymously. In the poem, the woman argues that character and intellect, not physical beauty, are what really matter in a woman, particularly in such challenging times.
Boston was known for its love of liberty, its piety, and its prostitutes.
