Who won the Battle of Bunker Hill?
Britain won the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775, but at such heavy cost that it felt like a defeat. American militia holding the hills above Boston twice tore apart the advancing redcoats before running out of ammunition, and the British lost 1,054 killed and wounded against about 450 Americans, proving raw colonial troops could stand against the finest army in the world.3
In June 1775, on the hills above Boston, a force of American colonial militia dug in and waited for the British army to come at them. Ordered to hold their fire until the enemy was close, they twice tore apart the advancing redcoats before running out of ammunition and giving up the ground. The British won the Battle of Bunker Hill, but at such a fearful cost that it proved the raw American militia could stand against the finest army in the world.4
Part of The greatest battles of the American Revolution · Before: Lexington and Concord · Next: The Battle of Long Island
The siege of Boston
After the first shots of the war at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775, New England militia poured toward Boston. Within two months more than 15,000 men from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island had hemmed in the 5,000 or so British troops of General Thomas Gage, and the National Park Service puts the besiegers at close to 20,000. In late May Gage was reinforced, and three more generals arrived to help him: William Howe, Henry Clinton and John Burgoyne.5
Boston could be threatened by artillery from two places: Dorchester Heights to the south-east, and the hills of the Charlestown peninsula to the north, Bunker's Hill and Breed's Hill, only about a quarter of a mile across the Charles River. The British planned to seize both. Hearing that Gage was about to occupy Charlestown, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety and the American officers decided to move first.6 › Lexington and Concord, 1775
A fort in one night
On the evening of 16 June about 800 Massachusetts and 200 Connecticut men under Colonel William Prescott marched onto the peninsula with picks and shovels. Their orders were to fortify Bunker's Hill, but for reasons never explained they dug instead on Breed's Hill, lower and closer to Boston and easier to surround. Under the direction of Prescott, General Israel Putnam and the engineer Colonel Richard Gridley, they threw up an earthen redoubt, roughly square, on its summit before dawn.7
At first light British warships in the harbor spotted the fort and opened fire, joined by a battery on Copp's Hill in Boston, but the bombardment did little damage, and the Americans kept digging. They added a breastwork about 100 yards long running north down the slope, and further north a rail fence was stuffed with grass and hay to make a breastwork toward the Mystic River. Colonel John Stark of New Hampshire strengthened the exposed left flank, and the colonists barricaded the beach below.8
The British come on
At about nine in the morning Gage and his generals ordered Howe to take the hill. They had to wait for the tide, and only around midday did boats ferry some 2,300 to 2,400 troops across to the peninsula. Howe planned to send his right wing along the Mystic beach to get behind the American line, while Brigadier General Robert Pigot attacked the redoubt. One British officer later wrote that the commanders had "expected rather to punish a mob than fight with troops that would look them in the face."9
Snipers firing from the houses of Charlestown harassed the British left, so British gunners fired red-hot shot into the abandoned town, and it burned to the ground during the battle.10
Hold your fire
The attack went in around 3:30 p.m. The Americans were short of powder, and their officers ordered them to hold their fire until the British were very close. Popular history has it that the order was "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes," but Britannica calls the phrase almost certainly apocryphal and the American Battlefield Trust treats it as legend. Whatever was said, the effect was devastating. The British column on the beach and the lines advancing on the rail fence were cut down by volleys at close range, and Pigot's men were thrown back from the redoubt.11
The British re-formed and came on again, and again they were driven back with heavy losses. "They advanced toward us in order to swallow us up," one American wrote, "but they found a choaky mouthful of us."12
The hill falls
For the third assault Howe concentrated against the redoubt. Its defenders had almost run out of powder and shot, and most had no bayonets. As the British came over the walls, the fight inside the fort became a bayonet melee, and the survivors fled. The men at the rail fence, with reinforcements pushed forward by Putnam, covered their retreat, and the British followed as far as Bunker Hill itself. The whole battle had lasted about two hours.13
Killed in the redoubt was Dr. Joseph Warren of Massachusetts, a leader of the Patriot cause who had been made a general but had gone in as a volunteer. On the British side Major John Pitcairn was killed; the American Battlefield Trust notes that a Black soldier named Salem was credited with shooting him, though the man's identity is uncertain.14
Breed's Hill or Bunker Hill?
The battle is named after a hill where little of it was fought. Prescott's orders had named Bunker's Hill, the higher of the two, but his men built their fort on Breed's Hill, and the British only pursued the fleeing Americans up Bunker's Hill at the very end. To add to the confusion, a British map drawn by Lieutenant Page after the battle swapped the names of the two hills. In time the name of the battle stuck to the ground where it was fought, and Breed's Hill is now commonly called Bunker Hill.15
Bunker Hill was also, as the National Park Service puts it, the first pitched battle between New England soldiers and the British army. Lexington and Concord had been running fights along a road; on the Charlestown peninsula, for the first time, the two sides stood and fought for a fixed position.16
Patriots of color
Black and Native American men served in the New England regiments on the hill. The best documented is Salem Poor. On 5 December 1775 fourteen officers, Prescott among them, petitioned the Massachusetts General Court on behalf of "A Negro Man called Salem Poor,", who "in the late Battle of Charlestown, behaved like an Experienced officer, as Well as an Excellent Soldier." Whether he was the Salem who, by an 1818 account, shot Major Pitcairn is an open question.17
A dear bought victory
The British had won the ground, but at a staggering price. Their losses were 1,054 killed and wounded, 226 of them killed according to the American Battlefield Trust, and Britannica counts 89 officers among the casualties. The Americans lost about 450, 115 of them killed, 305 wounded and 30 captured. The British suffered more than twice as many casualties as the men who had beaten them back.18
Henry Clinton called it "a dear bought victory." The losses, and the fight the colonists had shown, led the British commanders to abandon or postpone their plan to take Dorchester Heights.19
Why Bunker Hill mattered
The battle taught both sides a lesson. For the Americans, Britannica notes, it showed that the militia lacked organization and discipline, since many officers and men had held back when sent to reinforce the hill. But it also showed that inexperienced colonists could stand against the redcoats, and news of the battle helped unite the colonies behind the cause.20
That same June the Continental Congress appointed George Washington to command a new Continental Army, and in early July he took command of the troops around Boston at Cambridge. When he had gathered enough heavy guns, he seized and fortified Dorchester Heights in March 1776, the very ground the British had given up on after Bunker Hill, and forced them to evacuate Boston.21 › Battle of Long Island, 1776
The monument
The site on Breed's Hill where most of the fighting took place is marked by the Bunker Hill Monument, a granite obelisk 221 feet (67 meters) high. The Marquis de Lafayette laid its cornerstone in 1825, fifty years after the battle; it took more than 17 years to build and was dedicated in 1843. It stands on the site of the American redoubt, and visitors can climb its 294 steps to the top. Every year on 17 June people gather there to remember the battle, and abolitionists, suffragists and labor activists have all invoked it in their own causes.22 › Battle of Trenton, 1776
