Bunker Hill

man in the field.” At a section of Menotomy known as Foot of the Rocks, Warren put himself so squarely in harm’s way that a British musket ball struck out one of the pins that was holding up his curled hair. “The people were delighted with his cool, collected bravery and already considered him as a leader,” one commentator wrote.
    As a military novice, Warren clearly didn’t have much expertise to offer. What he did have was a charismatic talent for inspiring people. And he was learning.
    —
    Warren wasn’t the only one who tried to look his best that day. Before leaving Acton, many of the town’s militiamen carefully powdered their hair with flour. Jotham Webb was a brickmaker from Lynn. He’d recently gotten married, and before leaving that morning, he put on the wedding suit he’d worn just a few days before. “If I die,” he told his new wife, “I will die in my best clothes.”
    That afternoon Jotham and the rest of his company from Lynn decided to position themselves ahead of the British column near the house of Jason Russell in Menotomy. Russell, fifty-eight, had been about to reshingle his house, and using the bales of cedar shingles to create a kind of breastworks in his front yard, he, with the help of the militiamen, resolved to defend his property against the approaching British. Some of the militiamen were posted behind the shingles; others assembled on the hillside behind the house, where an orchard provided some cover. On the other side of the road, Gideon Foster and some militiamen from Danvers put together the makings of what they hoped would be an ambush. As the vanguard of the British column became visible coming down the road from Lexington, Russell’s neighbor Ammi Cutter warned him that he was much too close to the road for his own safety. Russell, who was lame and apparently quite stubborn, waved him off with the words, “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”
    The British hit them like a thunderbolt—not from the road, but from behind. As the militiamen looked eagerly for the column, flankers came at them from seemingly nowhere, flushing the provincials out of the orchard and toward the house. Since the column was coming at them from the road, they were trapped between the hammer and anvil of the flankers and the advance guard. The would-be ambushers had been outflanked, and one of the first killed was Jotham Webb in his new bridal suit, soon followed by his twenty-five-year-old friend Abednego Ramsdell.
    The desperate survivors of the initial British onslaught fled for the safety of Jason Russell’s house. Russell was killed on his own doorstep, shot twice and stabbed an estimated eleven times by British bayonets. The Russell house was a typical, very humble colonial structure—two rooms on the ground floor and two rooms upstairs, with a cellar down below. Anything but a castle, the home of Jason Russell was about to become a slaughterhouse.
    Eight men from Danvers, Beverly, and Lynn hurried into the darkness of the cellar. They proved to be the lucky ones. By blasting away at any regular who dared to approach the cellar entrance, they were able to hold off the soldiers even as they filled the beams of the house with bullet holes that can still be seen today. The militiamen who remained up above found themselves in the greatest trouble as the regulars poured into the house. Soon the rooms were filled with the ear-splitting boom of muskets and choking clouds of powdersmoke. In desperation, Daniel Townsend and Timothy Munroe jumped through the windows. Townsend took out the entire window sash and was dead when he hit the ground. Somehow Munroe was still alive when he tumbled from the window; he staggered to his feet and began to run. Regulars fired at him repeatedly but to no effect. “Damn him!” one was heard to cry. “He is bullet proof, let him go.” Munroe, who received just a wound in the leg, later found thirty-two bullet holes in his clothes and hat; even his buttons had been shot off. Outside the house Dennison Wallis was taken captive. He quickly realized that the British were executing their prisoners. So he decided to run for it. He ultimately received twelve wounds and was left for dead, but somehow he survived.
    A total of twelve provincials and two regulars were killed at the Jason Russell house. Later that day the dozen bodies were laid out in the south room. According to Jason Russell’s wife, the blood was “almost ankle deep” when she returned