Bunker Hill: A Siege, A City, A Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick is the perfect book to top off the nation’s 250th birthday year. Having spent most of my life in Massachusetts, having driven or walked through most of the places that Philbrick recreates, I didn’t think I’d have much to learn about the nation’s early history and the city I grew up in. But Philbrick’s brilliantly researched and retold account of the events leading up to Bunker Hill provides many aha moments.
It’s an old story, of course, but told in such a painstakingly granular way, that it opens our eyes to less-known details about both patriots and loyalists as well as the factions dividing each side. Philbrick provides new insights into the colonies torn between those who simply wanted liberty from onerous taxation and iron-heavy British governance but still thought of themselves as British, and those who wanted independence altogether. Philbrick explores their personalities, ambitions and limitations. We learn more about the disagreements and challenges inside the mother country as well. And we learn more about the different approaches of the British generals, the ultra-aggressive William Howe, whose every move drove the locals deeper into military action, and the more measured Thomas Gage.
On the home front, the focus is not just icons like John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere. We are on intimate terms with Dr. Joseph Warren, his prominence as a doctor giving way to his growth as a charismatic military leader; his deepening relationships with not just Mercy Scollay, the woman who became his wife, but his hidden relationship with Sally Edwards, his pregnant mistress. I met afresh Dr. Benjamin Russell, a member of the Provincial Congress secretly sharing crucial information with the British.
We’re not spared (as perhaps we were in elementary school) the rashness of some of the patriots, their frequent mob uprisings and even their violence (we learn every gruesome detail of the tarring and feathering of British loyalist John Malcom in Boston). We get a tactile sense of privations they endured and primitive inadequate armaments undermining their heroism in what would become an eight-year war.
Philbrick also sheds light on what really happened at both Bunker Hill and nearby Breeds Hill both defensively and offensively. The focus of this book is on Boston and the surrounding area in the years leading up to the battle, which was a turning point in the war. He would go on to write two more books on the Revolutionary War, focused more on George Washington.
His research and writing for Bunker Hill took three years leading to publication in 2013. He immersed himself in contemporaneous diaries, journals, publications, archives and historical societies. Yet his writing style is as easy and evocative as an historical novel. The vivid details bring to life characters and events that we once learned from dry hagiographic accounts from often-uninspiring history teachers.
Today, we can scoff at the hypocrisy of Bostonians fighting for freedom while a fifth of their families owned slaves. We can smell the fetid air of the battle, try to block out the screams of the wounded, and cringe at the rashness of British and provincial officers. Most of all, we can breathe a sigh of relief that the Founding Fathers like Samuel Adams and John Hancock, gathering in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, had the vision of a coordinated response that ultimately forged the 13 colonies into a new nation. Bunker Hill is a story well told, and worth reading again and again.
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