Bunker Hill

people” and describes their “unaccountable kind of stupidity” in letters to Lund Washington on August 20, 1775, and Richard Henry Lee on August 29, 1775, both in
PGW
, 1:336, 372. On Charles Lee’s differing reaction to the typical American militiaman, see John Shy’s “Charles Lee: The Soldier as Radical” in
George Washington’s Generals and Opponents
, edited by George Billias; according to Shy, “Washington and Lee looked at the same troops but where the Virginia planter saw only surliness and disobedience, the British radical saw alertness and zeal” (p. 34). In an October 21, 1775, entry in his journal, Jeremy Belknap records that Horatio Gates “said he never desired to see better soldiers than the New England men made” (p. 83). My statement that Washington believed the “ultimate aim of an army was . . . not to generate violence but to curtail it” is based in large part on Fred Anderson’s assertion in “The Hinge of the Revolution” that “the control, not the propagation, of violence was for him the core of military service. . . . To allow war to become the engine of revolution—would be to imperil the social order, together with all the laws, rights, and liberties that he hoped to preserve”; Anderson also discusses Washington’s concerns about recruitment and tour-of-duty as well as his realization that “local sympathies could tear an army to shreds” (pp. 31–34, 44, 45).
    Washington writes of making “a pretty good slam” among the officers from Massachusetts in an August 29, 1775, letter to Richard Henry Lee in
PGW
, 1:373. William Emerson writes of the “great overturning in camp” in a July 7, 1775, letter contained in his
Diary
, p. 79. J. L. Bell in
General George Washington’s Headquarters
describes how Washington dealt with the difficulties created among his officers by the commissions granted by the Continental Congress in the chapter “Generals Old and New,” pp. 87–128; Bell provides an overview of how Washington went about reinventing the provincial army in the chapter “Remaking the Troops into a Continental Army,” pp. 219–59; see also his “Engineering a New Artillery Regiment,” pp. 287–314. Israel Trask’s account of Washington’s handling of the two combative riflemen is in John Dann,
The Revolution Remembered
, p. 409. John Sullivan’s August 5, 1775, letter in which he tells of Washington’s stunned reaction to the lack of gunpowder is in Thomas Amory’s
John Sullivan
, p. 16. Washington writes of how “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command” in a November 28, 1775, letter to Joseph Reed, in
PGW
, 2:449. Abigail Adams’s comment that if Washington wasn’t “one of the best-intentioned men . . . he might be a very dangerous one” is cited by Richard Brookhiser in
George Washington
, p. 115. On Washington’s efforts to create the beginnings of a navy, see James Nelson’s
George Washington’s Secret Navy
and Chester Hearn’s
George Washington’s Schooners
. Allen French provides an account of the beginnings of the Arnold campaign up the Kennebec River to Quebec in
FYAR
, pp. 431–35. On Washington’s advocacy of the young Nathanael Greene and the even younger Henry Knox, Ron Chernow in
Washington
writes of how his “meritocratic bent . . . clashed with his aristocratic background and grew more pronounced with time. With Greene and Knox, he encouraged two aspiring young men who bore psychological scars from their childhood” (p. 205).
    J. L. Bell describes the various ways that Bostonians, including the swimming barber Richard Carpenter, managed to get in and out of the city in
Washington’s Headquarters
, pp. 361–66. Joseph Tinker Buckingham in
Specimens of Newspaper Literature
recounts Benjamin Russell’s adventures in Cambridge during the Siege (2:4–5); see also Francis Baylies’s
Eulogy on the Honorable Benjamin Russell
, pp. 8–12. Mercy Scollay writes of how the death of Joseph Warren “rendered me for a time incapable of . . . feeling any animating sensations” in a May 21, 1776, letter to John Hancock at CHS. She writes of her “uncertain situation” and her distress at discovering that John Warren had sold his brother’s “every feather bed to General Washington” in an August 17, 1775, letter to Dr. Dix in Worcester, also at CHS. Samuel Forman was the first to identify Mercy Scollay as the probable author of “An Elegy, Occasioned by the Death of