The air was thick with gunpowder and fear as I crouched behind the rough earthen walls we’d scrambled to build atop Breed’s Hill in these last hours of June 17, 1775, and the British were coming — red coats glinting like blood in the summer sun.
General Israel Putnam had ridden among us earlier, urging us to hold fast. We were told Colonel John Stark, a fellow New Hampshirite, whose troops were situated down the hill to cover our left flank, had placed a stake in the sand 50 yards out from his men manning the rail fence leading down to the Mystic river.
Stark had told his men, “Don’t shoot until they cross that line!” The same message was relayed to us. I could feel cold sweat on my brow and my hands were clammy, but Colonel William Prescott was a steady rock. As he paced nearby, his low and commanding voice barked, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their half-gaiters!”
“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their half-gaiters!” 1
We had limited ammunition and we needed to make every shot count. Below, the British ranks under General William Howe advanced, drums pounding, bayonets gleaming. Their first blood-red wave climbed the hill, disciplined and relentless, but we waited, muskets primed. When they were close enough that we could see their white splash guards, we unleashed a storm of lead. The Redcoats fell in heaps, their lines breaking under our fire. Dr. Joseph Warren, the famed physician-revolutionary who had alerted Paul Revere to take his warning ride to Lexington and Concord just a month earlier, was reloading his musket beside us, his face grim but resolute. Again the Lobsterbacks advanced, and again we fired, the hillside choked with smoke and screams, their officers shouting to rally the men up the blood-slick grass.
But our ammunition dwindled, and the third British assault breached our hastily dug defenses. Muskets empty, we gripped our knives and clubbed our guns, fighting hand-to-hand in a desperate melee. I swung at a Redcoat, his bayonet grazing my arm, as chaos erupted—men grappling, cursing, falling. We held as long as we could, but with no powder left, Prescott ordered the retreat. We fell back while Stark’s stalwart troops covered us, the British seizing Breed’s Hill, their victory bitter with high cost.2
They lost over a thousand men, nearly half their force, while we colonials suffered fewer than four hundred dead and wounded. Though we lost the hill that day, the battle burned a truth into us: we could stand against the mightiest army in the world. The British held the ground, but we’d bloodied them badly in this first true battle after Lexington and Concord, proving we could fight. Weeks later, General George Washington arrived to lead us, forging our ragtag militia into an army, our spirits kindled with the hope that we could win this war.3
Why is this scene playing out in my mind you ask? Good question. Because I’m a New Englander coming from Pennsylvania, headed to Italy. What?
The adventure (yes – it became an adventure of grand proportions), all started because I had an 8 hour layover in Boston’s Logan Airport waiting for an international connecting flight to Frankfurt, on the way to Rome as the new Pontiff was being installed, but that’s another story. Instead of sitting and twiddling my thumbs and inhaling stale airport air all day, I thought, “I’m going to see this as an opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to do: experience part of Boston’s Freedom Trail.”
It’s funny, you can grow up in an area famous for particular people or places and because it is your backyard and commonplace, you never experience the historical or fascinating things that draw other people to your area specifically for those reasons of fame. It’s a bit like the saying “the shoemaker’s kids don’t have shoes”. Or maybe in this case “the shoemakers kids don’t need shoes because they know they can have them whenever they want to and they just don’t get around to asking for any”. (I’m laughing.)
I had lived in several different parts of New England for the first 20 years of my life, including on and off in the greater Boston area for the next 20, having only visited the historic Faneuil Hall twice, but having always wanted to walk the Freedom Trail and experience with my own eyes the historic sites of the People of the American Revolution. It’s the people that create history. Not the places. But alas, it is only the places and objects they interacted with that can bring them back to life for us, and thus impart their legacy of lasting lessons.
Clambering out of the taxi, I arrived first at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, the beautiful Pre-Revolutionary War era cemetery above Old North Church. It was lush, quiet and serene apart from the happy Saturday exercisers and bird-watching-competition-contestants and officiators, out and about. As I stood there, marveling at the old headstones, I noticed the Bunker Hill monument in the distance. Ironically, Bunker Hill is a monument to American defeat … but not really.
This is where my mind envisioned the battle described above. Real people. Doctors, coopers, silversmiths, farmers, lawyers, older and teenage, joining together in a ragtag bunch to defend what was theirs. And defending what they wanted our country to be, for their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Us. You’re getting the picture. My day exploring history was becoming very personal. It was about to get more so.
Walking down the hill, very close by, was Old North Church, the center of my urban adventure. Upon first arrival, there was a well dressed high school choir wonderfully representing the beautiful “melting pot” that is our country. From afar, a strange thing was noticed – there were statues above the doorway of the famed church’s adjoining building. I had to know. Protestant buildings never have statues.
As I reached the building there was an intriguing, nephilim-sized man kindly giving instructions to someone in Old North Church’s ticket house. Dressed casually in T-shirt and well worn, flat-heeled-flat-toed cowboy boots, I figured he was some kind of behind the scenes worker at the national historic site and that he might know a little something about the buildings. I leaned into the metal fence, a bit below where he was standing and three feet below his head, and asked him my curious question about the statues. This led to a fascinating conversation about the transformation of the neighborhood surrounding Old North Church.
Long story short, because of my ardent love of history and architectural details clearly evident, I was invited to see inside Old North Church with (I later found out – one of the head honchos of the whole affair!!) a knowledgeable and friendly giant, by the name of Julius James. Because I looked (apparently) athletic and capable, I was invited to climb the stairs not many get to ascend … a private invitation … through a half sized old wooden door in the wall, to climb up tiny, tight winding wooden stairs and then very steep and narrow ladders, up into the bell tower, where the original bells still hang. Bells that Paul Revere — Yes! Paul Revere! — rang as a 15 year old. And I was sitting 4 feet from them!
On the way down, more lively conversation occurred with Julius the gregarious Nephilim…
“How did you come to be the chief “host of all hosts” here? How did you come to love history?” The response was beautiful. “My Dad.”
“My Dad used to make me watch all sorts of US war movies with him, and talk to me about them.” He said that he found in his father’s passion, that our American heritage was drilled into him from an early age. He told me that he grew to love those times spent with his Dad looking into what made Americans who we are as a nation and a culture: defending freedom for all.
We Americans sometimes take our freedoms for granted, as a right, not a privilege. It is something to be savored, and protected. A good friend of mine related a story recently about an Argentinian he encountered while traveling. The Argentinian man told my friend that the sense of freedom he felt here in the United States was “palpable, tangible, almost breathable,” in contrast to the constant sense of “fear and oppression” he felt in his homeland.
On this Memorial Day Weekend I am mindful of all persons who are stationed at the front lines, present-day Veterans, and all those who have served, including the many who lost their lives or were injured in all wars, on all battlefronts. I personally subscribe to the saying I heard long ago, that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
In fact as a mother of six sons, two of whom are serving military men, I make it a mission to live that premise day in and day out. With no control whatsoever over where they might be stationed in this nation’s ongoing battle for freedom, and as an incredible protector of other freedom-loving nations, I am so proud of my two oldest sons. One is an Airman. One is a Marine. They — and we their family with them — are committed to paying the price of liberty with our own eternal vigilance.4
On this Memorial Day, with my visit to the Old North Church and scenes from the Revolutionary War fresh in my mind, I am reminded that so many people have died — and sacrificed in so many other ways — for the freedom of our country, our personal freedoms, our way of life as we know it today. Freedom is costly, it is never free. Our democracy is not perfect, but it is the greatest and most successful social experiment in the history of the world. From Lexington and Concord, to Bunker Hill, to the Present Day, this is a country, an idea, a dream, a reality, where the “watchmen on the tower” must remain alert. It’s worth living for, worth sacrificing for! §
- It’s more romantic and poetic when you hear someone shout, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” But in the real world of armed combat, if you can see the whites of the enemies’ eyes you are the one most likely to be shot. The actual statement in those early days of the Revolutionary War, on this occasion at Breed’s Hill, Boston, was far more practical: “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their half-gaiters!”* It also meant, as in John Stark’s order, make sure the Redcoats’ feet are all the way to the marker stake 50 yards away.
(*Gaiters being the wrapping worn around many a soldier’s and hiker’s ankles and shins to keep out wet, dust, and prickles, while tramping off the beaten track; and if the American soldiers could see the whites of the British soldiers’ gaiters it meant that they were within 50 yards, so an effective shot was far more likely.)
https://revolutionarywarjournal.com/dont-fire-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes-fact-or-fiction/ ↩︎ - Colonel John Stark marched his New Hampshire men to Breed’s Hill (The Battle of Bunker Hill) on the morning of June 17. Amazingly, his troops bore the brunt of the first British assault and repelled all three British attacks on the Patriot left and even provided cover for Putnam’s and Prescott’s retreat! He was promoted to Major General by the end of the war.
https://www.historynet.com/general-john-stark-a-patriot-who-rose-above-rank/
https://bunkerhillmonumentassociation.com ↩︎ - Since I wasn’t actually there at Bunker Hill, the references for my narrative can also be found at the following sites —
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-true-story-of-the-battle-of-bunker-hill-36721984/
https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/paul-revere-americas-first-forensic-dentist/
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/revolutionary-war/battles/bunker-hill ↩︎ - Veritas Chronicles’ companion article about other Memorial and Remembrance Days can be found here
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