Bunker Hill

successfully transporting sixty tons of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge (a journey of three hundred miles), Henry Knox justified his appointment to colonel of the Continental Army’s troubled artillery regiment.

The British officer J. F. W. Des Barres made this sketch of the British lines at Boston Neck in 1775.

A view of Boston from Willis Creek in Cambridge by Des Barres.

Another Des Barres sketch, showing the islands of Boston Harbor from the city’s Fort Hill.

Boston from Dorchester Heights by Des Barres.

The minister Mather Byles was an unrepentant loyalist who chose to remain in Boston after the evacuation of the British. A noted punster, he called the soldier who was ordered to guard him his “observe-a-Tory.”

The immense crowd that gathered on June 17, 1843, to celebrate the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument.

Paul Revere’s 1768 depiction of the arrival of British troops at Long Wharf, the event that ultimately led, a year and a half later, to the Boston Massacre.

An engraving of Boston Common based on a 1768 watercolor by Christian Remick. The tents of the newly arrived British regulars are bracketed by the elm-lined Mall below and John Hancock’s mansion above.

An 1801 depiction of the Old State House, known as the Town House in pre-revolutionary Boston and the seat of the province’s General Court.

The Old South Meeting on the corner of Milk and Marlborough streets, where as many as five thousand people gathered prior to the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773.

Province House, the official residence of the colony’s governor, originally built in 1679 by Peter Sargent.

The copper weathervane atop Province House depicting an Indian archer. It was crafted by Shem Drowne and probably based on Massachusetts’s colonial seal.

Two wagons from Pope Night, Boston’s version of Guy Fawkes Day, the November 5 celebration during which rival gangs from the North and South Ends battled for supremacy. Included in this 1767 sketch by the Swiss artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière are caricatures of the devil and the pope.

The tarring and feathering of John Malcom in 1774 as depicted by the British artist Philip Dawe. The patriots are pouring tea down Malcom’s throat as a noose dangles menacingly from the branch of the Liberty Tree.

During the winter of 1774, the poet Phillis Wheatley described the patriots’ insistence on liberty and their tolerance of African American slavery as a “strange absurdity.”

Fanueil Hall, where Boston town meetings were traditionally held, was described by the patriot Thomas Young as a “noble school” of democracy.

The home of Dr. Joseph Warren on Hanover Street; it was from this house that Warren dispatched Paul Revere to alert the countryside that British regulars were on their way to Concord.

A satirical cartoon of Charles Lee, the eccentric British officer whose admiration for the patriot cause was almost as strong as his love for his Pomeranian dog, Spado.

Israel Putnam, known as “Old Put,” was a hero of the French and Indian War who played a prominent if controversial role in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Lord Percy was the young, impeccably bred British officer who led the mission to rescue Colonel Francis Smith’s regulars as they fought their way back to Boston from Concord.

Thomas Flucker was the provincial secretary of Massachusetts; his daughter Lucy married the patriot bookseller Henry Knox, who reported that his loyalist father-in-law was in possession of information that could only have been communicated by a British spy.

Benjamin Church, the famous Indian fighter whose 1716 narrative of King Philip’s War was reissued in the 1770s. This engraving by Paul Revere, who was a patriot colleague of Church’s great-grandson, Dr. Benjamin Church, may bear a distinct resemblence to the controversial doctor, who proved to be a British spy.

Francis Smith in 1764, eleven years before he led the British regulars to Lexington and Concord.

William Heath was the only provincial general on the scene during the British retreat from Lexington to Charlestown in April 1775. During the Siege of Boston, he vehemently opposed Washington’s plans to invade Boston.

General John Thomas was a physician from Kingston, Massachusetts, who commanded the American forces in Roxbury.

William Howe had a reputation as a master tactician in the British army; he was to meet his match at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Henry Clinton’s considerable