Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution
By Nathaniel Philbrick
Nearly every American as a schoolchild learns about the famous order issued on the morning of June 17, 1775: “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes!”
It’s even possible somebody actually said those words as the epochal battle of Bunker Hill approached, since ammunition was already in short supply and holding fire was a common tactic of 18th century warfare.
But if those famous words were said, they weren’t said on Bunker Hill.
In fact, the battle of Bunker Hill wasn’t even fought on Bunker Hill, rather on Breed’s Hill, a half mile away.
Don’t feel bad if you’re confused; the combatants themselves were often confused.
After more than 200 years of telling and retelling, scholarship and mythology, it’s no surprise that fact and fiction surrounding Bunker Hill have morphed into a quagmire of jumbled truths and fairy tales.
Wading into this thicket is popular historian Nathaniel Philbrick with “Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution,” a new, eminently readable telling of the battle that helped cut the umbilical cord between Great Britain and 13 of her rebellious North American colonies.
“Bunker Hill” is actually a multilayered biography of a city, Boston; a colony, Massachusetts; and the remarkable men and women who found themselves forced to make a life or death decision: liberty or loyalty, tyranny or treason?
Philbrick introduces a new generation to a nearly forgotten American hero, Dr. Joseph Warren, a young Boston physician, statesman and soldier who was a principal protagonist in a remarkable sequence of events beginning with the Boston Massacre in 1770 and culminating with the arrival of George Washington and the liberation of Boston from British occupation in the spring of 1776.
Philbrick’s gift is the master storyteller’s ability to bring the past vividly to life; he made the Pilgrims sexy in “Mayflower,” a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist. In “Bunker Hill” Philbrick brings us back to those turbulent times when nothing was settled, and when the powerful British Empire came apart at the seams.
Because we know how the American Revolution turned out, independence often seems a foregone conclusion; an inevitability. But an independent America was anything but a sure thing; in fact it wasn’t even desired by the vast majority of yeoman farmers and fisherman of Massachusetts who considered themselves loyal Englishmen devoted to their king and protector, George III. The American Revolution started as a battle for the rights of Englishmen.
The slow erosion of confidence in King George and the unnecessarily draconian actions of a distant Parliament eventually led to the “shot heard ’round the world” at Lexington and Concord and ultimately the showdown on Breed’s Hill in June 1775.
“Bunker Hill” recounts the anything-but-inevitable disintegration of trust and comity between friends and neighbors and fellow countrymen, with the brilliant and brave Dr. Warren as the conduit to events, culminating in his tragic death in battle.
The death of Warren was a huge loss for our country; his contemporaries believed he would have risen to the front ranks of the new nation’s Founding Fathers. His death was also a loss for Philbrick and “Bunker Hill,” removing from the story its central character at the moment the reader most wants him. Such is the historian’s burden; those pesky facts keep getting in the way.
Fortunately for Philbrick, the reader, and ultimately the new American nation, George Washington comes riding into Boston in the nick of time to save the day.
Doug McIntyre is a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News and can be heard weekdays on talk radio KABC 790 AM.