Bunker Hill Quotes

“When a group of frontiersmen camped on the middle fork of Elkhorn Creek heard about the militiamen’s deaths in Massachusetts, they decided to name their outpost for the historic event. That is why what was then a part of Virginia is known today as Lexington, Kentucky.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley,”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“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.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“This is also the story of two British generals. The first, Thomas Gage, was saddled with the impossible task of implementing his government’s unnecessarily punitive response to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Paul Revere Jr., with whom I had lunch at Spanky’s Clam Shack in Hyannis, Massachusetts.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“The Revolution had begun as a profoundly conservative movement. The patriots had not wanted to create something new; they had wanted to preserve the status quo—the essentially autonomous community they had inherited from their ancestors—in the face of British attempts to forge a modern empire.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Abigail Adams had hit upon the unappreciated radicalism that lay within the Declaration of Independence—“ that all men are created equal.” For most Americans in 1776 this was largely a rhetorical flourish, a claim of innate equality that did not apply to women and enslaved African Americans. But as the years unfolded and the words of the Declaration acquired a renewed and largely unanticipated relevance, many Americans began to realize that the work of the Revolution was far from over.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“when the region’s Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts had been reviled by the English as the literal children of Satan. Now that New England’s original inhabitants had been defeated, this most recent generation of colonists looked back on the struggles of the past with some nostalgia. Rather than despise the foes of their ancestors, they had begun to invoke and even honor their memory. Whether they disguised themselves as Mohawks during the Boston Tea Party or had come to recognize the tactical advantages of what their forefathers had once dismissed as the Indians’ “skulking way of war,” these men had moved in directions that would have been inconceivable to the Puritans of the past. After generations of adapting to their surroundings, they had become a people who were profoundly different from the British regulars watching them tensely from the North Bridge.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Gage had honored the civil liberties of the patriots, the patriots had refused to respect the rights of those with whom they did not agree, and loyalists had been sometimes brutally suppressed throughout Massachusetts. The Revolution, if it was to succeed, would do so not because the patriots had right on their side but because they—rather than Gage and the loyalists—had the power to intimidate those around them into doing what they wanted. As one of Gage’s officers observed, “The argument which the rebels employ to oblige everyone to do what they wish, is to threaten to announce them to the people as Enemies of Liberty, and everyone bends.” Not since the Salem witch trials had New Englanders lived with such certainty and fear,”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“But to say that a love of democratic ideals had inspired these country people to take up arms against the regulars is to misrepresent the reality of the revolutionary movement. Freedom was for these militiamen a very relative term. As for their Puritan ancestors, it applied only to those who were just like them. Enslaved African Americans, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy of the same freedoms they enjoyed. It did not seem a contradiction to these men that standing among them that night was the thirty-four-year-old enslaved African American Prince Estabrook, owned by town selectman and justice of the peace Benjamin Estabrook.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Claiming that he had violated the boycott against buying British goods, the patriots loaded the dead ox on a cart and stuffed Dunbar into its eviscerated body. The patriots proceeded to take Dunbar and the ox on a tour of the surrounding towns. By the time they reached Kingston, Dunbar was having difficulty breathing inside the fetid carcass. When he was allowed to walk beside the cart, however, the crowd accused him of intentionally tripping a child and stuffed him back into the ox. In Duxbury, the crowd pushed the animal’s slippery innards in Dunbar’s face before finally dumping him and the ox in front of Thomas’s house in Marshfield.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“In truth, the patriots were no different from any group of people. All of them were flawed, and all of them had something to hide.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America,”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“But to say that a love of democratic ideals had inspired these country people to take up arms against the regulars is to misrepresent the reality of the revolutionary movement. Freedom was for these militiamen a very relative term. As for their Puritan ancestors, it applied only to those who were just like them. Enslaved African Americans, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy of the same freedoms they enjoyed. It did not seem a contradiction to these men that standing among them that night was the thirty-four-year-old enslaved African American Prince Estabrook, owned by town selectman and justice of the peace Benjamin Estabrook. While Gage had honored the civil liberties of the patriots, the patriots had refused to respect the rights of”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“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.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

“is probable,” Warren wrote Samuel Adams, “that [Hutchinson] would have remained firm in [the people’s] interest . . . had there not been a higher station to which his ambitious mind aspired . . . ; in order to obtain this, he judged it necessary to sacrifice the people.” What was needed in America was a government in which “the only road to promotion may be through the affection of the people.” Instead of attaining membership in a group that existed above the people, the highest office in government should require an official to serve those people. “This being the case,” he wrote, “the interest of the governor and the governed will be the same.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution