Across a Quiet Harbor: Reading Bunker Hill 251 Years Later

By 1:30 p.m., the first wave of British boats had been loaded with regulars at Long Wharf and the North Battery and had begun to row across the harbor toward the Charlestown peninsula. Generals Clinton and Burgoyne had positioned themselves…on Copp’s Hill. They were not the only spectators that day…on top of every hill, roof, and steeple, the inhabitants of Boston looked to the north.

They were a community in the sky, their eyes trained across a quiet and, except for the warships, empty harbor in the boiling sun, looking toward a hilly peninsula and an unoccupied town…Cannons boomed from the battery and the surrounding ships, and now they could see the boats…between thirty and forty regulars in each…their musket barrels glittering in the sun.

Such detailed, delicious storytelling is why I love and recommend Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution. Starting with the Boston Tea Party, Philbrick takes readers through the subsequent military occupation of Boston, the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, and to Boston’s first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. 

I write this on the 251st anniversary of Bunker Hill: what a day to sit in Boston and type the passage above! It shows Philbrick’s irresistible writing style, packed with as much engaging imagery as history. He depicts events in great detail: not only every strategy and action of the battle, but also the steps to load and fire an 18th century cannon. He is masterful at vivid, descriptive language and weaving in people’s own words. There are many voices in the book, and they make its stories feel more richly human.

Captain John Chester of Connecticut was strolling in Cambridge after his dinner and, as he says, was “walking out from my lodgings quite calm and composed and all at once the drums beat to arms and the bells rang…” The son of General Israel Putnam rode up “in a full gallop,” shouting to him, “...father says you must all meet and march immediately to Bunker Hill.”

Mary Hartwell of Lincoln, MA, had a husband in the local militias around Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Her report of the British army’s march between those towns makes an iconic Revolutionary event into a family story, too: “The army of the king was coming up in fine order, their red coats were brilliant, and…made a fine appearance; but I knew what all that meant, and I feared that I should never see your grandfather again.”

The varied voices often bring smaller but important details into the foreground, as when thirteen officers filed a petition with George Washington in December, 1775, during the Siege of Boston, to get a soldier named Samuel Poor rewarded for “behav[ing] like an experienced officer as well as an excellent soldier” at Bunker Hill—and possibly for killing British Major John Pitcairn. Poor was a free Black man, and, like Caesar Bason and Samuel Ashbow who are featured in our blog this month, was one of the 103 Black or Indigenous fighters on the colonial side at Bunker Hill. Unlike those two, however, Poor survived. And by early 1776, he was able to join Washington’s Continental Army. 

In this 250th celebratory year, the scholarship and historical imagination of Philbrick’s book are a very enjoyable way to immerse oneself in Boston’s Revolutionary history.