Battle of Bunker Hill and the first martyr of the American Revolution

IT TOOK more than a month for the letter to reach John Adams in Philadelphia, but on June 18, 1775, Abigail Adams wrote the following words about events unfolding in Charlestown, just north of Boston: “The battle began upon our entrenchments upon Bunker Hill, a Saturday morning about 3 o'clock, and has not ceased yet and ‘tis now 3 o'clock Sabbath afternoon, ... How many have fallen we know not. The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot eat, drink or sleep.”

- JOSEPH J ELLIS

Abigail Adams had taken her eldest son, John Quincy, just shy of his eighth birthday, to view the distant battle from the top of Penn’s Hill near the family farm in Braintree (now Quincy).

They had witnessed from afar the pyrrhic British victory, achieved at the cost of more than 1000 casualties, nearly half the British attack force. Back in London, one retired British officer would observe that with a few more victories like Bunker Hill, the British army would be annihilated.

Nor did Abigail Adams learn until later that Joseph Warren, the Adamses’ family physician and prominent leader of the colonial resistance group the Sons of Liberty, had been killed when the third wave of the British assault overran his redoubt - he was shot between the eyes after the American troops had run out of ammunition.

“Our dear friend Dr Warren is no more,” she wrote, “but fell gloriously fighting for his country — saying better to die honorably in the field than ignominiously hang upon the gallows.”

Retrieving Warren’s body became a preoccupation of the colonists, who had to wait months until the British left Boston and his body could be recovered from a mass grave.