Bunker Hill: A Pyrrhic Victory

On the night of June 16, 1775, Colonel William Prescott led roughly 1,200 colonial troops onto the Charlestown peninsula and, in a decision historians still cannot fully explain, fortified Breed's Hill rather than the higher and more defensible Bunker Hill they had been ordered to occupy. By the next evening the British held the peninsula, but at a cost that shocked their own command. Ten primary documents survive at the Massachusetts Historical Society's Coming of the American Revolution project, including Prescott's own account and an eyewitness letter from Abigail Adams written the day after, watching from Braintree with her eight-year-old son John Quincy.

The Massachusetts Committee of Safety learned on June 15 that British General Gage intended to fortify the high ground around Boston. General Artemas Ward ordered Colonel Prescott to take Bunker Hill first. Prescott and his officers, arriving on the peninsula that night, chose instead to fortify Breed's Hill, a smaller rise closer to Boston and within cannon range of the city and the harbor.

The colonial troops worked through the night constructing an earthen redoubt roughly 160 feet long and 30 feet high, with breastworks extending down toward the Mystic River. British officers in Boston woke on the morning of June 17 to find fortifications that had not existed twelve hours earlier.

British troops under General Howe landed on the Charlestown shore at three in the afternoon and advanced uphill in formation. The colonial defenders, low on gunpowder, held their fire until the British were close. The first two assaults were repulsed with heavy British casualties. A soldier in the colonial works, Peter Brown, described the fighting in a letter to his mother eight days later.

The third British assault, reinforced with 400 fresh troops from Boston, carried the redoubt after the defenders ran out of ammunition. Colonel Prescott was among the last to leave, reportedly parrying bayonet thrusts with his sword. Dr. Joseph Warren, who had entered the fight as a volunteer rather than in command, was killed during the retreat.

The fighting and the fires set in Charlestown were visible from miles away on a clear day. Abigail Adams, at the family farm in Braintree with her eight-year-old son John Quincy, wrote to her husband John the day after the battle.

The Massachusetts Historical Society's own account, synthesized from the documents above and others in its collection, states that 140 colonists were killed and 271 wounded, while 226 British soldiers were killed and 828 wounded.

The British had taken the hill, but they had lost more than a thousand men doing it, a quarter of their entire force engaged. The battle convinced British commanders that the colonial militia could fight, and it convinced London that suppressing the rebellion would require a far larger commitment of troops than initially planned, including the hiring of German auxiliaries. Two weeks later, on July 2, 1775, George Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the army that had fought at Bunker Hill.