Bunker Hill

Warren and Hooten’s first child was conceived out of wedlock, p. 182.
    Samuel Forman hypothesizes that the John Singleton Copley painting titled
Lady in a Blue Dress
at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago is that of Mercy Scollay at age twenty-two (
DJW
, p. 379). Edward Warren, the son of Joseph Warren’s younger brother John, describes Mercy Scollay as “a woman of great energy and depth of character” in his
Life of John Warren, M.D.
, p. 87. The poem “On Female Vanity” appears in the June 1774 issue of Isaiah Thomas’s
Royal American Magazine
. In an introduction that precedes the poem, Thomas explains how he came to publish the poem: “I was lately in a company, where the conversation turned to the non-consumption agreement. . . . One of the company desired a lady to give him a list of the necessaries of life for a fine lady, and she soon sent him an elegant copy of verses; which falling into my hands I enclose to you.” “On Female Vanity” appears under the title “To the Hon. J. Winthrop, Esq.” in Mercy Otis Warren’s 1790 collection
Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous
. My thanks to J. L. Bell for identifying Mercy Otis Warren as the poem’s author. In a September 27, 1774, letter to Mercy Otis Warren, Hannah Winthrop repeats the rumor that the poem was written by Mercy Scollay and that Joseph Warren was “the gentleman who requested it” (in
Warren-Adams Letters
, 1:33).
    The June 27–28, 1774, town meeting minutes are in
Boston Town Records, 1770–1777
, pp. 177–80. Richard D. Brown in
Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts
includes a detailed account of the town meeting and cites Jonathan Williams’s letter describing the meeting’s first
day and the fact that there were “many people just idle enough to attend”; Brown writes, “The test revealed the limits of the Boston committee’s capacity for political leadership . . . always resting on continuous public consent rather than any formal, institutionalized authority” (pp. 196–99). John Andrews’s account of the meeting is in a July 22, 1774, entry in LJA, pp. 330–32. See also Stephen Patterson,
Political Parties in Revolutionary Boston
, pp. 83–85. John Rowe writes of the overwhelming vote in favor of the Committee of Correspondence in the June 28 entry of his
Diary
, p. 277. Gage complains of the “timidity and backwardness” of the loyalists in a July 5, 1774, letter to Dartmouth, in
Correspondence of Thomas Gage
,
p. 359. The June 1774 propaganda sheet inviting the soldiers to desert is in the Gage Papers at the Clements Library. Thomas Hutchinson writes of Gage’s unsettling letter to his wife in an August 20, 1774, entry in his
Diary
, 1:223–24. John Rowe records the arrival of Admiral Graves, General Percy, and the Fifth and Thirty-Eighth regiments in his
Diary
, p. 277. One of the best portraits of Percy during his time in Boston, even if heightened by more than a few fictional flourishes, is provided by Harold Murdock’s
Earl Percy’s Dinner Table
. Of note to J. K. Rowling fans, the Percy ancestral estate known as Alnwick Castle in Northumberland served as Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films. Lieutenant Williams of the Twenty-Third Regiment writes of the large number of prostitutes in Boston in a June 12, 1775, entry in his
Journal
: “Perhaps no town of its size could turn out more whores than this could. They have left us an ample sample of them” (p. 5). Mount Whoredom appears on several British maps of Boston made during the siege. John Andrews refers to the incident at Mrs. Erskine’s and the violent encounter after that, as well as to Percy’s attempts to see that justice was done, in an August 1, 1774, entry in LJA, pp. 333–35.
    The many letters chronicling the donations to Boston are contained in “Correspondence, in 1774–1775, between a committee of the town of Boston and contributors of donations for the relief of the sufferers by the Boston Port Bill,” in MHS
Collections
, 4th ser., 4:1–275. John Andrews mentions the donations from South Carolina, Marblehead, and Connecticut and the public works projects in an August 1, 1774, letter in LJA, p. 337; he complains of how “middling people” are the ones on whom “the burthen falls heaviest,” in an August 20 letter, p. 344. The Massachusetts Government and Justice Acts as they were received by Gage are reprinted in
PIR
, 1:506–19; in a postscript to Gage (also in
PIR
, 1:519–22), Lord