Bunker Hill A city, a siege, a revolution

Review by Choice Review

Nathaniel Philbrick has long demonstrated a rare talent for bringing new perspectives and sparkling prose to iconic episodes in US history (e.g., Mayflower, CH, Jan'07, 44-2887). As the subtitle suggests, this narrative centers on Revolutionary Boston and culminates in the Battle of Bunker Hill. The analysis seamlessly combines political and social history to evoke a city and a people under stress. The author's maritime sensibility further enhances its descriptive power. It is, however, the depiction of individuals, particularly Joseph Warren and Thomas Gage, that gives the work its engaging poignancy. Other features include useful maps, contemporary illustrations, and an impressive bibliography. Even more valuable are the 50 pages of notes, keyed to both chapters and pages of text, and presented as an extended essay illustrating the author's methods and explaining his judgments--an education in itself and a model of historiographic good sense. This book deserves to be ranked with David Hackett Fischer's classic Paul Revere's Ride (CH, Sep'94, 32-0497) as a superb evocation of early Revolutionary Massachusetts. No one interested in the American Revolution should miss this one. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. R. P. Gildrie emeritus, Austin Peay State University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

EACH year, on the anniversary of George Washington's successful siege of British-occupied Boston, a procession glides through the Province House, the old governor's mansion. The participants are the ghosts of colonial Massachusetts governors. Unable to accept that the British lost the American War for Independence, they are forever doomed to commemorate a moment when it might have gone the other way. No, of course it doesn't really happen. The Province House was torn down in 1922. The gloomy spirits are fictional. They haunt Boston in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" (1837). Nathaniel Philbrick and Richard R. Beeman are not writing fiction, but like Hawthorne, they winningly deliver twice-told tales about the founding events of the United States. The story of the American Revolution has been rehearsed again and again. And again. Would we agree with Shakespeare that nothing compares to the tedium of "a twice-told tale / Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man"? Hawthorne obviously didn't. And historians often retell old tales, if they can put something new into them. Fresh evidence can come to light, as Richard III's crookbacked skeleton recently did in an English parking lot. Or new methods can challenge or validate old sources; tree-ring analysis has revealed drought conditions in Virginia's early Jamestown settlement - no wonder the settlers failed to thrive (and apparently resorted to cannibalism). The results of these new interventions may be quite lively, even to the dull ear of the drowsiest person. Philbrick and Beeman adopt a third strategy: simply narrating the tale once more because a new generation of readers will see it differently. The world is always changing, after all, so the past is always worth another look. Philbrick, the author of several books of American history, guides us beautifully through Revolutionary Boston, with the Battle of Bunker Hill as his story's grand climax, while Beeman, who has written six books on the Revolution and the Constitution, draws all of the colonies (and Britain itself) into a chain of events that culminates in the drafting and acceptance of the Declaration of Independence; he nicely demonstrates that by 1776, the drafters and signers were old hands at that sort of thing. The stories intersect. If you read the books together, you see that the American Revolution had both local and protonational dimensions. The Powder Alarm, a British attempt to seize colonial matériel in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept 1, 1774, provides the drama for the fourth chapter of "Bunker Hill." Over in the sixth chapter of "Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor," news of the alarm arrives in Philadelphia, as the last express rider in a 70-hour relay halts his weary horse at Carpenters' Hall, where delegates in the First Continental Congress had, one day earlier, begun their deliberations. What should our generation derive from these stories? For Philbrick, global events enliven the old tale. Because of their own primordial insurgency, he says, "Americans have a tendency to exalt the concept of a popular uprising." They ought to appreciate any insurgents who seek democracy, including the "21st-century revolutionaries in the Middle East." So, from Bunker Hill, Boston, to Tahrir Square, Cairo. Beeman, more domestically inclined, exhorts Americans to consider the state of their nation. In his book's title, the key word is the last one, "honor," shame-inducing or inspiring, depending on what you think of yourself (or your political representatives) at the moment. "One of the recurring themes in this account of the decision for independence," Beeman italicizes, "is the importance of leadership." The exhortations are suggested, not belabored. Philbrick's comparison between the Arab Spring and the American Revolution is nevertheless sufficient to give several parts of the familiar American story surprising resonance. Boston patriots published under pseudonyms (just as Cairo's insurgents masked themselves behind Facebook), and there was brisk action in intercepting private letters (just as there was Egyptian surveillance of the Internet). We cannot regard partisan violence and the torture of civilians as entirely alien to our history after reading about John Malcom, a Boston loyalist who survived a horrific tar-and-feathering. When his scorched flesh peeled off in chunks coated in tar and feathers, Malcom preserved a piece as a withered souvenir to exhibit in London. Beeman's evocation of the then-and-now may seem less fresh simply because so many scholars have been asking us to celebrate the American founders as peerless leaders, including Beeman himself, in his "Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution" (2009). In both cases, however, the rationale for retelling the tale can be strained. Should we really think of the American founders as nothing but gleaming pillars of honor? It makes them seem impossible to emulate - why even try? - and it may not be true. Beeman points out that the main record of the Continental Congress is desperately incomplete. Its haphazard author, Charles Thomson, had hoarded "secret historical memoirs" of the proceedings but decided against writing a history based on them, lest he contradict received opinion. "Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men," Thomson concluded. "Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them, and thus good may be done." It is a disarming aside, coming a fifth of the way through Beeman's book. "A coup for mythmaking, but a disaster for history," he admits. Why admire honor that may not have existed? The many Americans who enjoyed the recent film "Lincoln" clearly appreciated how the 13th Amendment was devised as much in guile as "sacred honor." Might it not be useful to regard the Declaration of Independence the same way? Nor is it clear that Americans exalt popular uprisings as a matter of course. The young United States failed to support the next case in the Americas, that of Haiti (1791-1804), at least in part because a majority of white Americans did not believe black people deserved democracy. Moreover, people in the Middle East might think of the United States today as not unlike Britain of yore. Did the insurgents Paul Revere or Sam Adams ever imagine that the equivalents of British Redcoats would march - or launch drones - under an independent American flag? The story of America's popular uprising is necessary, but not sufficient, if we are to understand the nation as a whole. THE United States waxes and wanes. Sometimes, the nation is admirable and its example is useful to others. During the early 1800s, colonists in Latin America fought their own wars of independence, citing the United States' example - Simón Bolívar was their George Washington. Then American prestige declined. Hawthorne caught the sense of a nation in decline by describing Boston's repurposed Province House, in his day, as "a bar in modern style, well replenished with decanters, bottles, cigar boxes ... and provided with a beer pump." But the Republic rose up again, and its contagious liberty spread once more. The Declaration of Independence was a model for some of the nations that removed themselves from European empires in the wake of World War II, and again for several of the republics that wrested themselves out of the dying Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century. These two patriotic books suggest that America's founding could have comparable impact in the future. And yet the Boston Marathon bombings, done on Patriots' Day, apparently by disaffected Chechen-Americans (who had originally planned an attack on July 4), make it sadly clear that the tale has many twists. We can no longer regard partisan violence and the torture of civilians as entirely alien to our history. Joyce E. Chaplin's most recent book is "Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation From Magellan to Orbit."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2013]

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Review by Booklist Review

Philbrick's newest work chronicles the cradle of the American Revolution, Boston's action-packed years of 1773-76. Opening with the consequences of the Boston Tea Party, Philbrick depicts the arrival of British army and naval forces, the manifestation of the royal government's intention to quash the burgeoning rebellion in Massachusetts. Its leaders, patriots like John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Joseph Warren, provide the drama's counterpoise to British officials. Having deployed his characters, Philbrick launches each side's resort to military preparations and operations, a narrative that benefits from one of the author's several imaginative services to readers, detailing in word and map the geography of Boston and environs at that time. Another audience benefit is Philbrick's evocation of the look of patriot militias and British regiments, which enliven his crackling accounts of military movements that produced the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Displaying, as in Mayflower (2006) and The Last Stand (2010), a superior talent for renewing interest in a famed event, Philbrick will again be in high demand from history buffs.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Like most popular historians, Philbrick (Mayflower) writes about discrete events, not large developments. And he's good at it, even if the larger context is rarely considered and critical analysis gives way to story and celebration. Here, his focus is on events that began with the humiliations of the British at Lexington and Concord and ended with the siege of Boston, the American victory at Bunker Hill in 1775, and the departure in 1776 of British forces from New England's largest city. Philbrick correctly presents the battle at Bunker Hill as a critical moment in the opening stages of the War for Independence, and displays an empathy for the out-maneuvered British caught in the traps that the Patriots laid for them. He wisely makes as one of his central figures the Patriots' charismatic leader, Joseph Warren, who was killed at Bunker Hill, and who has since been largely forgotten, despite having been the man responsible for "orchestrating the on-the-ground reality of a revolution." Philbrick tells his tale in traditional fashion-briskly, colorfully, and with immediacy. The book would have benefited from a point of view more firmly grounded in a contemporary evaluation of the battle, but even as it is-no one has told this tale better. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, Inc. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Philbrick (Mayflower) here takes a fresh look at Boston and its environs from the December 1773 Tea Party through the British evacuation in March 1776. Painting rich portraits of the key players including Sam Adams, Joseph Warren, and British generals Gage and Howe, Philbrick argues that the roots of the American Revolution are to be found in the reactionary ethos of the Colonists, who simply wanted to preserve the status quo in the face of an encroaching British Empire, and that a series of growing misunderstandings and tensions culminated in the title battle. The narration by actor Chris Sorensen is clear and engaging. Verdict Recommended. ["...an exhaustively researched, intelligent.narrative with a sophisticated approach," read the review of the New York Times best selling Viking hc, LJ 4/15/13.-Ed.]-Forrest Link, Coll. of New Jersey Lib., Ewing (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Philbrick (Why Read Moby-Dick, 2011, etc.) will be a candidate for another award with this ingenious, bottom-up look at Boston from the time of the December 1773 Tea Party to the iconic June 1775 battle. Independence Day rhetoric extols our forefathers' battle for freedom against tyranny and unfair taxation, but the author points out that American colonists were the freest, most-prosperous and least-taxed subjects of the British Empire and perhaps the world. A century and a half of London's salutary neglect had resulted in 13 nearly independent colonies. Trouble began in the 1760s when Parliament attempted to tax them to help pay for the ruinously expensive victory in the French and Indian War. Unexpected opposition handled with spectacular clumsiness by Britain guaranteed trouble. Among Massachusetts' resistance leaders, most readers know John Hancock and Samuel Adams, but Philbrick concentrates on Joseph Warren, a charismatic young physician, unjustly neglected today since he died at Bunker Hill. His opposite number, British Gen. Thomas Gage, behaved with remarkable restraint. Despite warnings that it would take massive reinforcements to keep the peace, superiors in London goaded him into action, resulting in the disastrous April 1775 expedition to Lexington and Concord. They also sent a more pugnacious general, William Howe, who decided to expel colonial militias, now besieging Boston, by an uphill frontal attack on their entrenched lines, a foolish tactic. British forces succeeded but suffered massive casualties. It was the first and bloodiest engagement of the eight years of fighting that followed. A rewarding approach to a well-worn subject, rich in anecdotes, opinion, bloodshed and Byzantine political maneuvering.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Preface: The Decisive Day On a hot, almost windless afternoon in June, a seven-year-old boy stood beside his mother and looked out across the green islands of Boston Harbor. To the northwest, sheets of fire and smoke rose from the base of a distant hill. Even though the fighting was at least ten miles away, the concussion of the great guns burst like bubbles across his tear-streaked face. At that moment, John Adams, the boy's father, was more than three hundred miles to the south at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Years later, the elder Adams claimed that the American Revolution had started not with the Boston Massacre, or the Tea Party, or the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and all the rest, but had been "effected before the war commenced . . . in the minds and hearts of the people." For his son, however, the "decisive day" (a phrase used by the boy's mother, Abigail) was June 17, 1775. Seventy-one years after that day, in the jittery script of an old man, John Quincy Adams described the terrifying afternoon when he and his mother watched the battle from a hill beside their home in Braintree: "I saw with my own eyes those fires, and heard Britannia's thunders in the Battle of Bunker's hill and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled with them my own." They feared, he recounted, that the British troops might at any moment march out of Boston and "butcher them in cold blood" or take them as hostages and drag them back into the besieged city. But what he remembered most about the battle was the hopeless sense of sorrow that he and his mother felt when they learned that their family physician, Dr. Joseph Warren, had been killed. Warren had saved John Quincy Adams's badly fractured forefinger from amputation, and the death of this "beloved physician" was a terrible blow to a boy whose father's mounting responsibilities required that he spend months away from home. Even after John Quincy Adams had grown into adulthood and become a public figure, he refused to attend all anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Joseph Warren, just thirty-four at the time of his death, had been much more than a beloved doctor to a seven-year-old boy. Over the course of the two critical months between the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington Green and the Battle of Bunker Hill, he became the most influential patriot leader in the province of Massachusetts. As a member of the Committee of Safety, he had been the man who ordered Paul Revere to alert the countryside that British soldiers were headed to Concord; as president of the Provincial Congress, he had overseen the creation of an army even as he waged a propaganda campaign to convince both the American and British people that Massachusetts was fighting for its survival in a purely defensive war. While his more famous compatriots John Adams, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams were in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress, Warren was orchestrating the on-the-ground reality of a revolution. Warren had only recently emerged from the shadow of his mentor Samuel Adams when he found himself at the head of the revolutionary movement in Massachusetts, but his presence (and absence) were immediately felt. When George Washington assumed command of the provincial army gathered outside Boston just two and a half weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, he was forced to contend with the confusion and despair that followed Warren's death. Washington's ability to gain the confidence of a suspicious, stubborn, and parochial assemblage of New England militiamen marked the advent of a very different kind of leadership. Warren had passionately, often impulsively, tried to control the accelerating cataclysm. Washington would need to master the situation deliberately and--above all--firmly. Thus, the Battle of Bunker Hill is the critical turning point in the story of how a rebellion born in the streets of Boston became a countrywide war for independence. This is also the story of two British generals. The first, Thomas Gage, was saddled with the impossible task of implementing his government's unnecessarily punitive response to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Gage had a scrupulous respect for the law and was therefore ill equipped to subdue a people who were perfectly willing to take that law into their own hands. When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord, militiamen from across the region descended upon the British stationed at Boston. Armed New Englanders soon cut off the land approaches to Boston. Ironically, the former center of American resistance found itself gripped by an American siege. By the time General William Howe replaced Gage as the British commander in chief, he had determined that New York, not Boston, was where he must resume the fight. It was left to Washington to hasten the departure of Howe and his army. The evacuation of the British in March 1776 signaled the beginning of an eight-year war that produced a new nation. But it also marked the end of an era that had started back in 1630 with the founding of the Puritan settlement called Boston. This is the story of how a revolution changed that 146-year-old community--of what was lost and what was gained when 150 vessels filled with British soldiers and American loyalists sailed from Boston Harbor for the last time. Over the more than two centuries since the Revolution, Boston has undergone immense physical change. Most of the city's once-defining hills have been erased from the landscape while the marshes and mudflats that surrounded Boston have been filled in to eliminate almost all traces of the original waterfront. But hints of the vanished town remain. Several meetinghouses and churches from the colonial era are still standing, along with a smattering of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses. Looking southeast from the balcony of the Old State House, you can see how the spine of what was once called King Street connects this historic seat of government, originally known as the Town House, to Long Wharf, an equally historic commercial center that still reaches out into the harbor. For the last three years I have been exploring these places, trying to get a fix on the long-lost topography that is essential to understanding how Boston's former residents interacted. Boston in the 1770s was a land-connected island with a population of about fifteen thousand, all of whom probably recognized, if not knew, each other. Being myself a resident of an island with a year-round population very close in size to provincial Boston's, I have some familiarity with how petty feuds, family alliances, professional jealousies, and bonds of friendship can transform a local controversy into a supercharged outpouring of communal angst. The issues are real enough, but why we find ourselves on one side or the other of those issues is often unclear even to us. Things just happen in a way that has little to do with logic or rationality and everything to do with the mysterious and infinitely complex ways that human beings respond to one another. In the beginning there were three different colonial groups in Massachusetts. One group was aligned with those who eventually became revolutionaries. For lack of a better word, I will call these people "patriots." Another group remained faithful to the crown, and they appear herein as "loyalists." Those in the third and perhaps largest group were not sure where they stood. Part of what makes a revolution such a fascinating subject to study is the arrival of the moment when neutrality is no longer an option. Like it or not, a person has to choose. It was not a simple case of picking right from wrong. Hindsight has shown that, contrary to what the patriots insisted, Britain had not launched a preconceived effort to enslave her colonies. Compared with other outposts of empire, the American colonists were exceedingly well off. It's been estimated that they were some of the most prosperous, least-taxed people in the Western world. And yet there was more to the patriots' overheated claims about oppression than the eighteenth-century equivalent of a conspiracy theory. The hyperbole and hysteria that so mystified the loyalists had wellsprings that were both ancient and strikingly immediate. For patriots and loyalists alike, this was personal. Because a revolution gave birth to our nation, Americans have a tendency to exalt the concept of a popular uprising. We want the whole world to be caught in a blaze of liberating upheaval (with appropriately democratic results) because that was what worked so well for us. If Gene Sharp's From Dictatorship to Democracy, the guidebook that has become a kind of bible among twenty-first- century revolutionaries in the Middle East and beyond, is any indication, the mechanics of overthrowing a regime are essentially the same today as they were in the eighteenth century. And yet, given our tendency to focus on the Founding Fathers who were at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia when all of this was unfolding in and around Boston, most of us know surprisingly little about how the patriots of Massachusetts pulled it off. In the pages that follow, I hope to provide an intimate account of how over the course of just eighteen months a revolution transformed a city and the towns that surrounded it, and how that transformation influenced what eventually became the Unites States of America. This is the story of two charismatic and forceful leaders (one from Massachusetts, the other from Virginia), but it is also the story of two ministers (one a subtle, even Machiavellian, patriot, the other a punster and a loyalist); of a poet, patriot, and caregiver to four orphaned children; of a wealthy merchant who wanted to be everybody's friend; of a conniving traitor whose girlfriend betrayed him; of a sea captain from Marblehead who became America's first naval hero; of a bookseller with a permanently mangled hand who after a 300-mile trek through the wilderness helped to force the evacuation of the British; and of many others. In the end, the city of Boston is the true hero of this story. Whether its inhabitants came to view the Revolution as an opportunity or as a catastrophe, they all found themselves in the midst of a survival tale when on December 16, 1773, three shiploads of tea were dumped in Boston Harbor. Excerpted from Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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