This Day in History: The Battle of Bunker Hill

It should of course, as countless pedants like to point out, be called the "Battle of Breed's Hill". Bunker Hill had an earthwork on top of it, but no business resulted. The action occurred a half mile to the east, on the slopes of Breed's Hill.

All in all it was a lousy idea to occupy that hill. The Americans were, no doubt, thinking that with such a commanding position they could rain down artillery fire upon the British fleet in Boston harbor. But what artillery did they plan to use? They had none; and the Rebel army outside Boston would be without cannon sufficient to threaten the Royal Navy until the next winter, after Henry Knox's epic march from Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain.

What they were, those New Englanders on the Charleston peninsula, was bait. And the British Army rose at the offer. They embarked in their longboats, headed out into the Charles River, and prepared to hit the Rebel positions from three sides. It would end the Massachusetts rebellion in one decisive stroke.

In the end it did not work like that. Time and tide and the complexity of the landscape funneled the British assault into a frontal attack. And it was not just Massachusetts that the British marched against. On that day they confronted all of New England. There were Massachusetts men in the redoubt on Breed's Hill, sure enough, while William Prescott paced back and forth on the ramparts for all to see. But those were men of Connecticut behind the rail fence who awaited the assault of the Guards. Rhode Island men waited in trenches. And that was John ("Live Free or Die") Stark of New Hampshire on the beach behind the stone wall that he had had built in haste, waiting for the light infantry to come in lines of eight abreast.

In the end, of course, the Rebels lost. They were driven from that hill in a rout. But that rout presaged the majority of battles for the next eight years. Time after time the British Army, in good 18th century fashion, would hold the ground when the battle was over. But they did it at considerable cost. Veterans of wars with the French would say, after Bunker Hill, that they had never known such ferocious combat. They said it with pride, then, because they believed that they were fighting fellow Englishmen who would always fight better than the Frogs ever could. Yet they would continue to say the same thing in the long years ahead when even the most ardent proponent of British imperial rule admitted that they were no longer fighting Britons, but Americans.

There's a great website on the Battle of Bunker Hill courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Check it out.