The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

Three artillery companies had performed dismally. Several timid commanders faced court-martial and dismissal from the service. American generalship had been muddled and indecisive, leaving the force “commanded without order and God knows by whom,” a senior officer wrote. Although the Essex Gazette claimed Putnam was “inspired by God Almighty with a military genius,” Colonel Stark denounced him as “a poltroon.” Much blame fell on Artemas Ward, “a general destitute of all military ability,” in the opinion of the new president of the provincial congress, James Warren.

      The incineration of Charlestown, the first of several American towns to be obliterated during the war, stirred both sorrow and rage. A survey found that 232 houses, 95 barns, 76 shops, 25 warehouses, a dozen mills, 81 miscellaneous buildings, and 17 wharves had burned, with losses exceeding £100,000. Of 450 eventual claims, some came from Bostonians who had moved their household goods to Charlestown for safekeeping, like Sarah Hunstable, who lost nine feather beds, six mahogany chairs, three looking glasses, and more. A church census calculated that two thousand residents had been consigned to “the most aggravated exile.”

      Yet the battle would soon be seen as a triumph of patriot moxie. “I wish [we] could sell them another hill at the same price,” observed a new brigadier general from Rhode Island named Nathanael Greene. The lawyer William Tudor wrote John Adams on June 26, “The ministerial troops gained the hill, but were victorious losers. A few more such victories, and they are undone.” Even if Prescott and his comrades were not “supported in a proper manner,” wrote Samuel Gray from Roxbury, “this battle has been of infinite service to us—made us more vigilant, watchful, and cautious.” Bunker Hill also reinforced the conviction that inflamed citizen soldiers, summoned to battle from field or shop, could hold their own against professional legions, a charming myth that took deep root and would nearly prove the undoing of America. Cheeky rebels soon appropriated a scornful British ditty to serve as a defiant American anthem. “‘Yankee Doodle’ is now their paean, a favorite of favorites,” a British officer said, “esteemed as warlike as ‘The Grenadiers’ March.’”

      For days, Yankees with spyglasses in Roxbury and on Dorchester Heights watched the regulars dig graves. With so many dead men to bury, Gage ordered the mourning bells in Boston silenced. Fallen officers like Major Pitcairn found graves in sanctified ground at Old North or in other churchyards. Their effects were quickly auctioned off in officers’ messes or, as in the case of Lieutenant Colonel Abercrombie, at “the large tree in front of the encampment of the 22nd Regiment”: swords, pistols, silk waistcoats, fancy hats, mattresses, spurs, all sold to the highest bidder. Page after page of new promotion announcements soon appeared; there was nothing like a bloodletting to advance careers.

      Privates were laid in a common pit on the marshy ground between Breed’s and Bunker Hills, then dusted with twenty barrels of quicklime. Many who died of their wounds were consigned to trenches on Boston Common. The American dead on the peninsula were dumped without ceremony into mass graves or hasty bury holes, including Joseph Warren, interred with an anonymous companion in a farmer’s frock. Captain Walter Laurie, who had commanded the star-crossed detachment at Concord Bridge, told London that his burial detail had found Warren’s body and “stuffed the scoundrel with another rebel into one hole, and there he & his seditious principles may remain.” Grave robbing became so pernicious on the peninsula that Howe threatened severe punishment for malefactors. “Added to the meanness of such a practice,” he warned, “a pestilence from the infection of the putrefied bodies might reach the camp.”

      Midsummer gloom pervaded that camp, despite efforts to depict the battle as a triumph. “Another such,” Clinton said, “would have ruined us.” A cynical officer suggested that the rebels should plan “to lose a battle every week ’til the British army was reduced to nothing.” On June 23, Gage ordered an assault on Dorchester Heights, then quickly canceled the attack, convincing himself that he could command the heights with artillery if necessary. Resentments festered among his officers, at the combat shortcomings of their rank and file—“discipline, not to say courage, was wanting,” Burgoyne sniffed—and at the high command. “From an absurd and destructive confidence, carelessness, or ignorance, we have lost a thousand of our best men and officers,” a seething officer wrote. “We were all wrong at the head.”

      Gage waited eight days to tell London of Bunker Hill, in a nineteen-sentence dispatch that was spare to the point of duplicity. “This action,” he asserted, “has shown the superiority of the king’s troops who … defeated above three times their own number.” An oversized casualty chart with perfectly lined columns contained delicate calligraphic flourishes on the k’s and w’s that at least gave ornamentation to the killed and wounded. But in a private note to Lord Dartmouth, Gage conceded that casualties were “greater than our force can afford to lose.… The rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be.… Your Lordship will perceive that the conquest of this country is not easy.” In a letter to Barrington on June 26, Gage added, “These people … are now spirited up by a rage and enthusiasm as great as ever people were possessed of.” He continued:

      You must proceed in earnest or give the business up. The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear. Small armies can’t afford such losses.… I wish this cursed place was burned.

      The news stunned England. Newspapers promptly published maps of Bunker Hill, which were studied intently by fretful readers. “The ministers now saw America was lost, or not to be recovered but by long time and expense,” Walpole told his journal. “Yet, not daring to own their miscarriage, pushed on.” Rumors circulated that fratricide had caused half of all British losses, that regulars had thrown down their arms rather than fight, that a disgraced General Gage had returned to England dressed as his wife. In fact, Margaret Kemble Gage came home dressed as herself aboard the three-masted Charming Nancy, accompanying sixty widows and orphans, plus 170 badly wounded soldiers. Correspondents who met the ship in Plymouth described “a most shocking spectacle,” including “some without legs, and others without arms, and their clothes hanging on them like a loose morning gown.” Many were said to be “in a state of complete alcoholic dependence.” The Plymouth guildhall collected donations for the widows—sixteen shillings each. One writer, upon viewing this homecoming, concluded that “60,000 men would not be able to bring the Americans under subjection.” William Eden wrote Lord North, “If we have eight more such victories, there will be nobody left to bring the news of them.”

      The king held firm, of course. For months British newspapers would chronicle the presentation of wounded officers at court, as in this announcement: “Yesterday Captain Cockering, who lost his arm at Bunker’s Hill, was introduced to His Majesty at St. James’s.… His Majesty was pleased to present him with a captain’s commission in a company of invalids.” The king also decided, as Barrington informed Gage, that injury compensation would be paid, retroactive to Lexington. An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year’s pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year’s pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were “deemed slain in battle.” No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

      Another deranged afternoon had come and gone in Massachusetts, and yet that awful Saturday lingered for every man in harm’s way. “Some other mode must be adopted than gaining every little hill at the expense of a thousand Englishmen,” Glanville Evelyn of the King’s Own told his family. Just before midnight on June 17, Evelyn had taken a moment to write his will, philosophically reflecting that those in “the profession of arms hold their lives by a more precarious tenure than any other body of people.”

      As Captain Evelyn pondered the future, others tried to forget the past. Reverend David Osgood, a New Hampshire regimental chaplain, would recall as an old man how for the remaining eight years of war after Bunker Hill “a burden lay upon my spirits.… Visions of horror rose in my imagination, and disturbed my rest.” A British officer in the 63rd Regiment of Foot could only agree. “The shocking carnage that day,” Major Francis Bushill Sill wrote in a letter home, “never will be erased out of my mind ’till the day of my death.”

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