Bunker Hill

vivid, to be contaminated by the politicians’ presence. In his diary he imagined the scene in front of the monument with “Webster spouting with a Negro holding an umbrella over his head and John Tyler’s nose with a shadow outstretching that of the monumental column.” “How could I have witnessed all this,” he wrote, “without an unbecoming burst of indignation or of laughter?” No, it was best that he had remained at home.
    John Quincy Adams had a history of refusing to attend celebrations associated with the Battle of Bunker Hill, which had proven to be the bloodiest engagement of the eight years of fighting that followed. In 1786, as a student at Harvard, he had not accompanied his fellow classmates on a trip to Breed’s Hill to enjoy a memorial dinner where the head of the table was “placed on the very spot where the immortal Warren fell.” “I passed the day in the solitude of my study,” he remembered, “and dined almost alone in the hall.” He owed the fact that he could hold a pen with his once-broken right hand to Dr. Warren, and for John Quincy, who, like his father, had kept a diary for almost all his life, the act of writing was essential to his very being.
    Other Adams family members shared his reverence for the memory of Joseph Warren. In 1786, the same year that John Quincy declined to attend the dinner at Breed’s Hill, his mother had seen a new painting by George Washington’s former aide John Trumbull titled
Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill
. Although full of historical inaccuracies, the painting, in which Warren is shown dying in the arms of a fellow provincial soldier as a British regular threatens to stab him with a bayonet, had an immense impact on Abigail Adams when she first saw it in London. “I can only say,” she wrote, “that in looking at it, my whole frame contracted, my blood shivered and I felt a faintness at my heart.” She predicted that Trumbull’s painting “will not only secure his own fame, but transmit to posterity characters and actions which will command the admiration of future ages and prevent the period which gave birth to them from ever passing away into the dark abyss of time whilst he teaches mankind that it is not rank or titles, but character alone, which interests posterity.”
    This, according to Abigail, was the meaning of the Revolution—that it was “character alone” that mattered. It was a conviction that as early as March 1776 prompted her to insist that her husband in his capacity as a delegate to the Continental Congress “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands . . . [since],” she wrote, “your sex are naturally tyrannical.” It was a conviction that also prompted her to wonder, despite her immense respect for the slave owner George Washington, whether “the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs. Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principle of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us.”
    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.
    And so on the evening of June 17, 1843, as John Quincy Adams looked toward Charlestown, his appreciation of what he’d witnessed sixty-eight years earlier was accompanied by an invigorating sense of righteous anger. In the distance, he could see the monument’s pyramid-shaped top rising out of the smoke that wafted from “the cannonade salute of the closing day.” Then came, he wrote, “in forcible impulse to my memory the cannonade and the smoke and the fire of the 17th of June 1775.”
    It was not for him to spout purple platitudes about men like Joseph Warren who had died so that they could all be free. It was up to him, who as a seven-year-old boy had watched and wept beside his thirty-year-old mother, to continue what the doctor had helped to