Battle of Bunker Hill

Two months into the American Revolutionary War, on 17 June 1775, British regulars stormed colonial earthworks on the Charlestown Peninsula, across the harbour from besieged Boston. They drove the New England militia off the heights at the third attempt, but lost more than a thousand men killed or wounded in an afternoon. Though most of the fighting took place on Breed's Hill, the clash is named after the taller Bunker Hill nearby, and it showed that untrained colonial soldiers could stand up to the British army.

After the battles of Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775, around 15,000 colonial militiamen under Artemas Ward hemmed the British into Boston, then a near-island linked to the mainland by a narrow neck. General Thomas Gage held the town with about 6,000 troops, supplied by the Royal Navy. The hills around the harbour mattered greatly, because cannon placed on them could bombard the town.

Gage and the newly arrived generals William Howe, John Burgoyne and Henry Clinton planned to seize the surrounding heights, with an attack set for 18 June. Word of the plan reached the colonial leaders, who decided to move first.

On the night of 16 June, about 1,200 men under Colonel William Prescott crossed onto the Charlestown Peninsula. After some debate among the officers, they passed over Bunker Hill and chose the lower Breed's Hill, closer to Boston, and dug a square earthen redoubt with walls about six feet high. At dawn a British warship spotted the works and opened fire, and soon guns across the harbour joined in, though with little effect. Prescott realised his position could be outflanked and began extending it with a breastwork, while Connecticut men under Thomas Knowlton and New Hampshire reinforcements under John Stark lined a rail fence running down towards the Mystic River.

The British needed hours to ferry troops across the water. By mid-afternoon Howe had landed his men, and naval fire set Charlestown village alight to drive out snipers. Howe led the attack on the fence line while Brigadier Robert Pigot advanced on the redoubt. The colonists held their fire until the regulars were close, then cut them down in large numbers. A second attack failed in much the same way.

Behind the colonial lines there was confusion: many men never crossed onto the peninsula, ammunition ran short and desertion thinned the ranks. With fresh troops sent by Clinton, Howe ordered a third assault in column against the redoubt itself, with bayonets fixed. The defenders, almost out of powder and mostly without bayonets, were overrun. Joseph Warren, a leading Massachusetts Patriot who had just been named a general but fought as a volunteer, was killed in the retreat. An orderly withdrawal by the troops at the fence allowed most of the colonists to escape over Charlestown Neck.

The British took the peninsula, but at a heavy price. Their losses reached 1,054, with 226 killed and 828 wounded, many of them officers, the worst toll Britain suffered in any single engagement of the war. Clinton remarked in his diary that more victories of this kind would soon finish British rule in America. Colonial losses were about 450, including 138 killed, most of them during the retreat.

The battle made British commanders far more cautious about frontal attacks on prepared positions and strengthened the case for hiring German auxiliaries. In London, the casualty figures shocked the military establishment, the king's stance hardened, and a proclamation declaring the colonies in rebellion followed about a month after Gage's report arrived. Gage was soon recalled and replaced by Howe. George Washington, travelling north to take command of the new Continental Army, drew encouragement from the news. The struggle that followed became the American Revolution.

Our 1715 map shows Massachusetts as a British colony within the British Empire, and the 1783 map shows it as part of the independent United States.