Bunker Hill

Harbor, the fading of the stars overhead into a gray, increasingly bluish sky, and then the sudden realization that they were digging a fortification that might very well become their collective grave. When the provincial soldiers paused to look around, they could now see that instead of being set back on the distant height of Bunker Hill, they were here, on the little knoll of Breed’s Hill, overlooking Charlestown. Peter Brown of Westford, Massachusetts, was appalled. He estimated that they were surrounded by eight cannon-equipped ships, along with “all Boston fortified against us.” “The danger we were in,” he wrote to his mother in Newport, Rhode Island, “made us think . . . that we were brought there to be all slain, and I must and will venture to say that there was treachery, oversight, or presumption in the conduct of our officers.”
    In front of them was Charlestown, tucked into the side of the hill and the harbor. To the east was the sweep of an easy slope that ran down to a thirty-five-foot shoreside bump known as Morton’s Hill. There were some fences, some swampy ground, and the clay pits of a brick kiln, but nothing of any substance to prevent an army of regulars from landing at the tip of the peninsula and attacking from their unprotected left. Here they were—all by themselves, already exhausted and sleep-deprived, with no one to support them.
    Just as this terrifying realization began to settle in, they saw a bud of flame erupt from the side of one of those nearby warships, followed by a soul-shattering roar and the hissing smack of a cannonball as it buried itself in the dirt. It was the sloop-of-war
Lively
, and soon enough, another cannonball was flying through the air in their direction. It was mesmerizing, the way you could see the black dot arc lazily through the cloudless sky, all the while knowing that it was going to land somewhere near where you were standing. The officers assured the men that while the cannons made plenty of noise, they were, in actuality, surprisingly ineffective when it came to killing soldiers. It was time to get back to work and finish the fort.
    On the third, perhaps the fourth, shot one of those black dots proved the officers wrong. Thirty-five-year-old Asa Pollard of Billerica was working in front of the redoubt when a four-inch-diameter cannonball weighing nine pounds divided his head from the rest of his body. This was more than many of these young recruits could stand. They asked Colonel Prescott what they should do with their friend’s headless corpse. A minister offered to say a few words before Pollard was committed into the ground, but Prescott insisted that he be buried immediately and that they continue to work on the fort. The minister seems to have succeeded in conducting an impromptu service, but it was Prescott who soon had his men’s attention.
    He leaped onto the parapet of the redoubt, and as cannonballs continued to sizzle through the air, he urged the men on. He had a three-cornered hat on his head, and “strutting backward and forward” with a long evening coat (known as a banyan) swirling about him like a colorful cape, he pulled the hat off his head and, waving it in the air, shouted at the British warships below them, “Hit
me
if you can.” It was a most inspiring display of courage, and yet what one veteran later remembered was how all the hat-waving had somehow displaced Prescott’s pigtail so that “it hung over his right shoulder, giving him a quite ludicrous appearance.”
    Prescott had fought with such distinction during the French and Indian War that he had been offered a commission in the British army—an offer he was quite happy to refuse. An anger smoldered inside Prescott, who appears to have had no patience with Israel Putnam’s nostalgic fondness for the British officers with whom he had fought in Canada. A few months earlier, his brother-in-law Abijah Willard, a loyalist, had warned him “that his life and estate would be forfeited for treason” if he took up arms against Britain. “I have made up my mind on that subject,” Prescott replied, “I think it probable I may be found in arms,
but I will never be taken alive
.”
    Prescott could see that they were dreadfully open to attack on the left. They needed to build an earthen wall that ran more than 150 feet to the east, where it would connect with a virtually impassable swamp. If men were posted behind that wall, the British would have a much harder