Bunker Hill

Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series
, edited by Philander Chase
    PIR —Province in Rebellion: A Documentary History of the Founding of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1774–1775
, edited by L. Kinvin Wroth
    PNG —Papers of Nathanael Greene
, vol. 1, edited by Richard Showman
    SHG —Sibley’s Harvard Graduates
, by Clifford Shipton
    SSS —The Spirit of Seventy-Six
, edited by Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris
    WMQ —William and Mary Quarterly
     
    An immense amount has been written about the American Revolution, especially as it relates to its beginnings in Boston, and I am indebted to all the authors and editors referred to in the notes and bibliography. Several late-breaking (and, in one instance, ongoing) additions to the scholarly canon have provided information and insights that would have not been available if I had attempted to write this book just a few years earlier. Samuel Forman in his biography
Dr. Joseph Warren
(2011) has brought a much-needed physician’s perspective to the life of his subject while unearthing all sorts of new connections and associations, particularly when it comes to Warren’s relationship with his fiancée, Mercy Scollay. Two books about the Battle of Bunker Hill, Paul Lockhardt’s
The Whites of Their Eyes
(2011) and James Nelson’s
With Fire and Sword
(2011), have provided different but complementary perspectives on the battle, while Nelson’s earlier publication
George Washington’s Secret Navy
(2008) helped put the maritime side of the story in a fresh context. Although the Boston Tea Party is only briefly touched on in what follows, Benjamin Carp’s
Defiance of the Patriots
(2010) arrived just in the nick of time, as did Ron Chernow’s monumental
George Washington
(2010), Vincent Carretta’s
Phillis Wheatley
(2011), Jack Rakove’s
Revolutionaries
(2010), T. H. Breen’s
American Insurgents, American Patriots
(2010), Neil Longley York’s
Henry Hulton and the American Revolution
(2010), and Ray Raphael’s
Founders
(2009), which expanded on the view originally presented in Raphael’s New England–specific
The First American Revolution
(2002). Most recently, the publication of J. L. Bell’s
General George Washington’s Headquarters and Home—Cambridge, Massachusetts
(2012) by the U.S. Park Service has given the story of the Siege of Boston a depth and scholarly rigor that had not previously existed. Bell’s blog
Boston 1775
continues to provide an informative and highly entertaining window into the history and scholarship of revolutionary Boston.
    Two final points: First, I have adjusted the spelling and punctuation of quotations to make them more accessible to a modern audience—something that had already been done by the editors of several collections cited below. Second, even though provincial Boston was technically a town (since it was governed by a board of selectmen instead of a mayor), I refer to it on occasion as a city. Not only does this help to distinguish Boston from the much smaller towns in the province; it reflects the usage of those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom the term “city” applied to any community, large or small, as in John Winthrop’s biblically inspired reference to Boston as a “city on a hill.”
    Preface— The Decisive Day
    The description of John Quincy Adams’s response to the Battle of Bunker Hill is based primarily on the notes provided in Abigail Adams’s June 18, 1775, letter to her husband, in
Adams Family Correspondence
, edited by L. H. Butterfield, pp. 222–24. My thanks to Caroline Keinath at the Adams House National Historic Site in Quincy, Mass., for showing me the hill on which John Quincy Adams and his mother watched the battle. In a February 13, 1818, letter to Hezekiah Niles, John Adams writes, “But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations” (
Works
, 10:282–89). On the ways that interpersonal relationships determined political beliefs, see the quotation from Henry Laurens cited by Gordon Wood in
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
in which Laurens claimed that personal animosities “did more to make him a patriot . . . than all the whig pamphlets he might have read” (p. 63); Wood also cites the claim by a Philadelphian that he