Bunker Hill

Quincy, Jr.,” writes of Quincy’s ever-changing views when in London during the fall and winter of 1774–1775 (pp. 266–85), as do Daniel Coquillette and Neil Longley York in
Portrait of a Patriot
(1:35–76), which contains the edition of Quincy’s
London Journal
from which I quote in the text (1:223–69). Concerning North’s “Conciliatory Proposition,” Peter Thomas in
Tea Party to Independence
writes that “North evidently believed that he had found a permanent solution to the imperial crisis” (pp. 199–200); Thomas also cites Thomas Hutchinson’s optimistic letter to his son (p. 218). Dartmouth’s January 27, 1775, letter to Gage is in
DAR
, 3:37–41.
    My account of Joseph Warren’s Massacre Day Oration is based on the following sources: two letters written by Samuel Adams on March 12 and 21, 1775, in
Writings
, 3:154–55, 160–62; Thomas Hutchinson’s conversation with Colonel James, who attended the oration, as recorded in Hutchinson’s
Diary
for Sept. 6, 1775, 1:528–29; Lieutenant John Barker’s
Diary
, March 6, 1775, pp. 25–26; Frederick Mackenzie’s
Diary
, March 6, 1775, pp. 36–39; the March 16, 1775, issue of
Rivington’s New York Gazetteer
; and J. P. Jewett’s biography of Joseph Warren in
The Hundred Boston Orators
, pp. 59–60. Eran Shalev’s “Dr. Warren’s Ciceronian Toga: Performing Rebellion in Revolutionary Boston” provides a useful analysis of the classical resonances of Warren’s oration; the manuscript version is in the John Collins Warren Papers at MHS. The reference to Warren’s “true puritanical whine” is in Thomas Bolton’s “Oration.” Samuel Forman in
DJW
writes that Warren’s description of the fallen husband and father was “recalled for him from his father’s untimely death” (p. 62); Forman also points out that the dramatic paragraph in which Warren refers to “fields of blood” was “written as an insertion on a separate piece of paper” (p. 234). According to David Hackett Fischer in
Paul Revere’s Ride
, “In the New England dialect with its lost postvocalic
r
’s, ‘Fie! Fie!’ sounded like ‘Fire! Fire!’ ” (p. 70).
    Thomas Ditson’s account of the events leading up to and including his tarring and feathering by the soldiers appears as a footnote in
JEPC
, pp. 131–33. When it came to the complaints about Ditson, John Andrews recorded that Gage was “greatly disgusted with their remonstrance (being a very spirited one) but finally dismissed them with every assurance of protection from danger”; March 18, 1775, letter in LJA, p. 400, which also contains Andrews’s description of Bolton’s oration. A manuscript version of Bolton’s “Oration” is at MHS. Bolton wasn’t the only one pointing out the moral duplicity of the patriots; in
Bodies Politics: Negotiating Race in the American North
, John Wood Sweet cites a British play performed during the Boston occupation in which a black prostitute named Fanfan “rebukes ostensibly chaste Sons of Liberty, for their hypocrisy: ‘Tho’ in public you scoff, / I see many a spark, / Would tink me sweet pretty / Girl in the Dark’ ” (p. 149). John Rowe complains of being mentioned in Bolton’s “Oration” in a March 15, 1775, entry of his
Diary
, p. 290. John Andrews writes of his “irascibility rising” in a March 18, 1775, letter in LJA, p. 401. Sanborn C. Brown writes about Mary Dill Thomas’s affair with Benjamin Thompson and quotes her claim that “she would roast in hell rather than give him up” in
Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford
, pp. 35–36.
    Robert Brand Hanson, editor of Nathaniel Ames’s
Diary
, published in 1998, was the first to make the link between Warren’s “
incognita pregnans
”
and Sally Edwards (p. 278). Samuel Forman in
DJW
expands upon that identification by noting that Mercy Scollay later referred to Sally Edwards as a “little hussy” and “vixen” in letters written to Mrs. Dix on July 27, 1776, and November 26, 1776 (CHS, pp. 185, 189). Having independently identified that a Sally Edwards who turned thirteen in 1774 later married the eldest son of Paul Revere (which is not mentioned in Forman’s book), I asked Forman if he had explored that connection, and he generously shared with me that he had indeed made the possible identification, in a personal communication, February 23, 2012. Whether or not she was the same Sally Edwards who eventually married a son of Paul Revere, it appears almost certain that at some