Bunker Hill

muzzle . . . against [the regular’s] right shoulder, a little below the collarbone, and fired, and he fell into the trench.” Bancroft was convinced that he had killed Major Pitcairn, but that honor appears to have been won by Salem Poor, a free African American.
    As the redoubt filled up with a chaotic mixture of British and American soldiers, Prescott realized that he must order a retreat. At this point Joseph Warren was said to have demonstrated great bravery, exhibiting, one provincial wrote, “a coolness and conduct which did honor to the judgment of his country in appointing him a major-general.” With their gunpowder expended, some of the provincials grabbed the still-warm barrels of their muskets and began swinging them like clubs. The roiling dust and smoke inside the redoubt made it difficult to see, and one provincial told how he was “obliged to feel about for the outlet.” Those who couldn’t find the sally port simply climbed over the redoubt’s walls and did their best to flee. Those who were unable to escape quickly fell victim to what Adjutant Waller described as the grenadiers’ “rage and ferocity.” “I cannot pretend to describe the horror of the scene within the redoubt . . . ,” he continued, “’twas streaming with blood and strewed with dead and dying men, the soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the brains of the others. . . . We tumbled over the dead to get at the living, who were crowding out of the gorge of the redoubt.”
    After shooting the British officer with his last charge of gunpowder, Ebenezer Bancroft realized it was time to get out of the fort. He was particularly proud of his musket, “a venerable one,” that he’d “taken from the French” during the war in Canada. Holding the musket “broadside before my face,” he rushed into the mass of regulars ahead of him and then “leaped upon the heads of the throng in the gateway.” Punching and kicking his way out of the redoubt, he finally broke free and with “a shower of shot falling all around me . . . ran down the hill.” He lost a forefinger to a musket ball but eventually made it back to Cambridge alive.
    Watching from Boston’s Beacon Hill, the loyalist Samuel Paine “heard the shouts of the British army whom we now saw entering the breastworks and soon they entered and a most terrible slaughter began upon the rebels who now were everyone shifting for himself.” Thomas Sullivan wrote that the provincial forces were “so thick and numerous in the works that they maybe justly compared to a swarm of bees in a beehive. Our brave men ran through with their bayonets, such of them as had not time to run away.”
    Colonel Prescott was one of the last out of the redoubt. Surrounded by the enemy, he had, his son wrote, “several passes with the bayonet made at his body, which he parried with his sword.” By the time he exited the redoubt, his banyan and waistcoat had been “pierced in several places, but he escaped unhurt.”
    Warren may have left the fort even after Prescott, who had no knowledge of what eventually happened to the provincial leader. Some later claimed that not wanting to be taken alive, Warren actively sought death. But if that were the case, it’s difficult to understand why he died with several incriminating letters in his pocket from Bostonians sympathetic to the provincial cause. It’s just as likely that, caught up in the considerable heat of the moment, he took it upon himself to cover, as best he could, the retreat of his compatriots. By this time in the battle he’d acquired a sword, which he waved in the air as he “endeavored to rally the militia.” About sixty yards from the redoubt, he was “bravely defending himself against several opposing regulars” when he was recognized by an officer. The officer’s servant impulsively took up a pistol and “in a cowardly manner” shot Warren in the face, the ball entering just below his left eye and exiting through the back of his head.
    —
    Not until the next morning did General Howe discover that Joseph Warren was dead. By that time the British had succeeded in flushing the provincials from the Charlestown peninsula. Israel Putnam, so unsuccessful at digging an entrenchment on Bunker Hill, had spent the night overseeing work on nearby Prospect Hill to the west. Prescott, after bitterly asking Putnam why he had not provided the promised support, assured the ever fretful General Ward that “the enemy’s