Bunker Hill

September 4, 1774, letter to Samuel Adams in Frothingham’s
LJW
, p. 356; Frothingham also reprints Adams’s September 25, 1774, letter to Warren in which he refers to the suspicions concerning New England at the Continental Congress and the fear that Massachusetts wants “a total independency” (pp. 377–78).
    My account of the effect of the Powder Alarm and the Suffolk Resolves on the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia is based in large part on Edmund Cody Burnett,
The Continental Congress
, pp. 39–46, which cites the quotations from Silas Deane and John Adams. Jack Rakove writes insightfully about the Congress’s response to the Suffolk Resolves and the move toward moderation after their endorsement in
The Beginnings of National Politics
, pp. 45–49. The text of the Suffolk Resolves appears in
PIR
, 2:914–20. On Paul Revere’s role as “the Mercury of the American Revolution,” see David Hackett Fischer,
Paul Revere’s Ride
, pp. 26–28; as Fischer states, Revere, whom a loyalist described as a patriot “ambassador,” was “less than an ambassador, but more than merely a messenger” (p. 28). John Andrews provides a day-by-day account of the measures Gage took to defend Boston from a possible incursion from the country that includes the anecdotes about the marksmen and giant from the country; Andrews also writes of the outflow of weapons and the stealing of cannons, both by land and water, and Gage’s frustrations with building barracks for his soldiers (LJA, pp. 355–74), and of the decision of Admiralty Court that the navy “had no right . . . to stop or molest any boats carrying merchandise,” in a November 21 letter (p. 386).
    Walter McDougall in
Freedom Just Around the Corner
writes of Americans being on average two inches taller than Europeans (p. 124). Vincent Kehoe in
We Were There!
points out that “there were few [among the regulars] who were old soldiers enough to be called veterans,” and that it had been more than twelve years since any of them had seen action (p. 9).
Nathaniel Appleton recounts the conversation between two Louisbourg veterans about the fortifications on the Neck in a November 15, 1774, letter to Josiah Quincy Jr., in
Memoir of Josiah Quincy Jr.
, pp. 202–3. As John Galvin writes in
The Minute Men
, the concept of the minuteman dated back to the French and Indian War (p. 33). The incident involving William Dawes, the cannon, and Joseph Warren was told by Dawes’s granddaughter and is in Henry Holland’s
William Dawes and His Ride with Paul Revere
, p. 37. William Tudor also speaks of the theft of two cannon from the gun house beside the common in
The Life of James Otis
, pp. 452–55. John Andrews chronicles the sufferings and death of large numbers of British soldiers, specifically commenting on how fatal the rum distilleries proved to be when used as barracks: “the smell of the lees in the cisterns added to their urine, has caused an infectious distemper among ’em, whereby two or three have dropped down dead of a day,” in LJA, pp. 389–93. Major John Pitcairn writes that rum “will destroy more of us than the Yankees will” in a March 4, 1775, letter to Lord Sandwich, printed in
Naval Documents of the American Revolution
(subsequently referred to as
NDAR
), edited by William Bell Clark, 1:125. Andrews writes of the execution of the soldier on the common and of how repeated whippings meant that “their ribs are laid quite bare,” as well as of the fieldpiece in the center of town “to be fired in case of a mutiny,” in LJA, pp. 357, 397, 393. Gage tells of his difficulties throughout the fall in letters to Dartmouth, which climax with his plea for an army of twenty thousand men in an October 20, 1774, communication in
Correspondence
, p. 383.
    Joseph Warren compares the delegates at the Provincial Congress to “an assembly of Spartans or ancient Romans” in a November 21, 1774, letter in Frothingham’s
LJW
, pp. 346–49. In an October 16, 1774, letter to Samuel Adams, John Pitts writes that he is “informed by a member of the congress that the Boston Committee are by far the most moderate men,” Samuel Adams Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Joseph Warren’s letters to and from Samuel Adams, in which he seeks his advice about the best course to take that fall (and refers to being “rapacious for the intelligence”), are reprinted in Frothingham’s
LJW
, pp. 355–58,