Bunker Hill

in an August 25, 1775, letter to John Adams in the appendix to
HSOB
, pp. 395–97. John Brooks, the twenty-three-year-old doctor who carried Prescott’s call for reinforcements to General Ward, later became governor of Massachusetts, and in 1818 he along with several of his staff walked Breed’s Hill, where he told William Sumner about Prescott’s histrionics on the redoubt wall; William Sumner, “Reminiscences of Gen. Warren and Bunker Hill,” p. 228. Prescott’s son recounts his father’s stubborn insistence that the men who had built the redoubt “should have the honor of defending [it]”; Frothingham,
Battle-Field of Bunker Hill
, p. 19.
    The claim that if Gage and Howe had followed Clinton’s advice they would have “shut [the provincials] up in the peninsula as in a bag” appears in a July 5, 1775, letter from an anonymous British officer in
SSS
, p. 135; this same account discusses the lack of reconnaissance on Howe’s part and its tragic consequences. In a June 20, 1775, letter, Lord Rawdon writes in
SSS
that the “men-of-war in the harbor could not elevate their guns sufficiently to bear upon [the redoubt]” (p. 130). Prescott’s son told of Gage’s conversation with Prescott’s brother-in-law Abijah Willard in Frothingham’s
Battle-Field of Bunker Hill
, p. 26–27. Paul Lockhardt in
The Whites of Their Eyes
is justifiably skeptical that this interchange ever occurred, claiming that “the idea that Willard could have seen and recognized Prescott, given the primitive optics of the day and the amount of gunsmoke that must have hung in the air, seems implausible at best” (footnote, p. 227). However, given that Prescott was dressed in a much-commented-on banyan (a loose-fitting coat), facial recognition probably was not required, and I’m inclined to believe the anecdote, particularly given the source and my own experience with telescopes from the eighteenth century.
    The activities of the Committee of Safety on June 17 can be traced to a limited extent in its minutes in
JEPC
, p. 570. Charles Martyn provides a useful analysis of the activities at Hastings House involving General Ward and the Committee of Safety in
The Life of Artemas Ward
, pp. 125–27, as does Paul Lockhardt in
The Whites of Their Eyes
, pp. 231–33. According to Samuel Swett, soon after the arrival of Major Brooks, Richard Devens’s “importunity with the general and the Committee [of Safety] for an ample reinforcement was impassioned and vehement, and his opinion partially prevailed; the committee recommended a reinforcement, and the general consented that orders should be dispatched immediately to Colonels Reed and Stark”;
History of Bunker Hill Battle
, p. 25. There are several accounts of Warren stating that it was his intention to join the fighting at Bunker Hill. Warren’s roommate Elbridge Gerry later told his biographer that Warren “entrusted to Mr. Gerry alone the secret of his intention to be on the field”; James Austin,
The Life of Elbridge Gerry
, 1:79. Warren’s apprentice David Townsend tells of Warren being “sick with one of his oppressive nervous headaches and, as usual, had retired to rest” in Hastings House on the morning of June 17; “Reminiscence of Gen. Warren,” p. 230. William Heath writes of Putnam and Prescott’s interchange about the entrenching tools in his
Memoirs
, p. 13. Ebenezer Bancroft’s account of using a cannon to blast out an embrasure is in his
Narrative
in John Hill’s
Bi-Centennial of Old Dunstable
, pp. 59–60. Bancroft later learned that the two cannonballs he had fired through the redoubt sailed all the way into Boston, with one landing harmlessly in Brattle Square, the other on Cornhill (p. 60). In a June 19, 1775, letter to Isaac Smith Jr., Andrew Eliot describes the provincials being “up to the chin entrenched” (p. 288). Colonel Jones’s June 19, 1775, account of what he appears to have seen while watching with Generals Burgoyne and Clinton on Copp’s Hill is in Frothingham’s
Battle-Field of Bunker Hill
, pp. 45–46. Burgoyne tells of his concern that the battle might result in “a final loss to the British Empire in America” in his June 25, 1775, letter to Lord Stanley in
SSS
, pp. 133–34.
    Chapter Ten— The Battle
    John Chester’s account of the alarm in Cambridge and of how he and his men hid their uniforms beneath their civilian clothes is in the appendix to
HSOB
, pp. 390–91. A transcript of Azor Orne’s June 17, 1775, letter