Granite and Bone, The Contested Memory of Bunker Hill

“ It proved to be a striking victory, however, for historians agree that the Battle of Bunker Hill set the pace that led to ultimate victory in the American War of Independence. This little force of farmers, mechanics, tradesmen, and professional men had demonstrated how Americans should fight, when their independence is threatened.
On the field where the battle was fought, the Bunker Hill Monument has now stood for over a century, the rugged lines of its granite masonry symbolizing the enduring strength of the stern spirit of American independence that it commemorates. ”

“ If there was nothing of value in the principles of the American Revolution, then there is nothing valuable in the battle of Bunker Hill and its consequences. But if the Revolution was an era in the history of man favorable to human happiness, if it was an event which marked the progress of man all over the world from despotism to liberty, then this monument is not raised without cause. ”

“ To all Americans, Bunker Hill was a battle cry and an inspiration during the seven long years of war necessary to obtain our independence. To-day its memories should rekindle our patriotism and prompt us to recall the story of the men who there died that a new republic might be born. ”

“ Such was the result of the famous Battle of Bunker Hill, a contest from which Great Britain derived little advantage beyond the credit of having achieved a brilliant passage of arms, but which, on the other hand, produced the significant effect of manifesting, not only to the Americans themselves, but to Europe, that the colonists could fight with a steadiness and courage which ere long might render them capable of coping with the disciplined troops of the mother-country. ”

“ But the victory was won at such frightful expense [Pg xvi] of life to the British that it was not until forty years had brought forgetfulness, that they tried a similar assault in military form against the Americans at New Orleans. The farmers could shoot as well as think. After Bunker Hill the Revolution was recognized as a serious war, not a mere mad uprising of hopelessness. Washington took control of the destinies of America. Congress proclaimed its Independence. ”

“ Bunker Hill had practically emancipated the American yeomanry from the dread of British arms, and foreshadowed the finality of National Independence. However the American Congress might temporize, there was not alternative with Washington, but a steady purpose to achieve complete freedom. From his arrival at Cambridge, until his departure for New York, he worked with a clear and serene confidence in the final result of the struggle. A mass of earnest men had come together, with the stern resolve to drive the British out of Boston ”

“ Bunker Hill Monument celebrates a fact more important than most victories—namely, that the raw provincials faced the British army for two hours, they themselves being under so little organization that it is impossible to tell even at this day who was their commander ”

“ Today there is a monumental spire on Bunker Hill, visible throughout much of the city. The willingness of the republican revolutionaries to take up arms and fire on their oppressors has left a cultural legacy that two full centuries have not effaced. Bunker Hill is still a potent center of American political symbolism, and the Spirit of '76 is still a potent image for those who seek to mold public opinion. ”

“ All at once the traits of some immediate ancestor may come to maturity unexpectedly on one of the branches of your character, just as your features at different periods of your life betray different resemblances to your nearer or more remote relatives.
But I want you to let me go back to the Bunker Hill Monument and the dynasty of twenty or thirty centuries whose successive representatives are to sit in the gate, like the Jewish monarchs, while the people shall come by hundreds and by thousands to visit the memorial shaft until the story of Bunker's Hill is as old as that of Marathon. ”

“ Though small in its dimensions, if compared with great European battles, or with the giant contests of our own civil war, the struggle at Bunker Hill is memorable and instructive, even from a purely military point of view. Excessive slaughter; significance of the battleConsidering the numbers engaged and the short duration of the fight, the destruction of life was enormous. Of all the hardest-fought fields of modern times, there have been very few indeed in which the number of killed and wounded has exceeded one fourth of the whole force engaged. ”

“ There has been a great deal of controversy as to who commanded the American troops at Bunker Hill, and there is apparently no reason why the controversy should not be kept up, as long as the question is at bottom one of rivalry between Connecticut and Massachusetts. The difficulty in settling it points to the true conclusion, that the work of that battle was largely the work of distinct bodies of men hardly organized as yet into an army. ”

“ When no more ammunition could be procured by our officers, stones were resorted to, as the last means of defence. This rather encouraged than repelled the enemy, as it showed they had nothing else to use. At last, in spite of every exertion it was in the power of men to make, who felt they were fighting for their country and their homes, the British gained possession of the redoubt. They were opposed at every step of their advance; the butt ends of the guns which the Americans could no longer fire, were made use of to keep them back ”

“ Now at Bunker Hill though the Americans had not our modern weapons of precision, yet a similar effect was wrought by the remarkable accuracy of their aim, due to the fact that they were all trained marksmen, who waited coolly till they could fire at short range, and then wasted no shots in random firing. Most of the British soldiers who fell in the two disastrous charges of that day were doubtless picked off as partridges are picked off by old sportsmen, and thus is explained the unprecedented slaughter of officers. ”

“ The British stubbornness was in the end fortunate for the colonies, for the American victories of the War of Independence were won by the common-126sense tactics natural to men who had handled long rifles from their boyhood, and who had learned to hide first and shoot afterwards. The slaughter of the retreat from Concord to Boston, the terrible losses at Bunker Hill, the defeats at Bennington and Saratoga, were the work of men who sighted their foe with the same precision that they aimed at wildcats, and took as few chances as possible themselves. ”

“ I had heard the muskets’ rattle of the April running battle;
Lord Percy’s [1] hunted soldiers, I can see their red coats still;
But a deadly chill comes o’er me, as the day looms up before me,
When a thousand men lay bleeding on the slopes of Bunker’s Hill. ”

“ The ammunition of the provincials began to fail, and the British artillery, 66now brought up to the breast-work, swept it from end to end, while three simultaneous attacks carried it at the point of the bayonet. Courage now could avail nothing, and the provincials under Colonel Prescott made good their retreat across Charlestown Neck, exposed to an incessant fire from the shipping, and entrenched themselves on another height still commanding the entrance to Boston. The British took possession of Bunker’s Hill. This defeat the Americans esteemed as a victory ”

“ If falsities in our American history can creep upon us whilst our eyes are open to surrounding evidence, is it to be wondered at that there are so many contradictions and so many myths in the history of Rome? The very name America is a deception, a fraud, and a perpetuation of as rank injustice as ever stained the annals of human events. It is to be hoped that the time will yet come when Columbus shall receive his due. When that millennial day arrives which will insist on calling things by their right names, the battle of Bunker’s Hill will be called the battle of Breed’s Hill. ”

“ I’d have to tell you about hundreds and hundreds of graves scattered over the battle fields that no one knows about, and which, because no one knows of them, are not decorated at all, unless Nature herself is kind enough to let a little dandelion or a daisy patch into the secret, so that they may grow on the green grass above these forgotten, unknown heroes who left their homes, were shot down and never heard of afterwards. ”

“ But not every man can be buried just where he falls. As a rule, the spot remains under fire for some time after his death. Even if it could be done, and the history of the war be left written in this way on the face of the country,—a long dotted line of graves representing a trench, a cluster of graves a skirmish, a dense constellation a battle—the record would not be durable. France could not fence off a strip of country 300 miles long and many miles wide, and keep it up as a historical museum. And nothing else could preserve all the graves, or most of them. ”

“ We walked through these gloomy vaults—each holding a candle, amidst millions and millions of human bones carefully piled and arranged on both sides of us. Holes in many skulls indicated death by bullets in battle or in scenes of violence, and short moral passages engraved on stone monuments reminded the visitor here and there of the instability of human pride and human life. ”

“ If the past teaches us anything, it is that challenges persist. A century ago, J. Franklin Jameson and the American Historical Association were crying out for the establishment of a National Archives, for we were losing our national memory. ”

“ The most potent of all nation-molding factors, the one indispensable factor which must be present whatever else be lacking, is the possession of a common tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and victories won in common, expressed in song and legend, in the dear names of great personalities that seem to embody in themselves the character and ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred places wherein the national memory is enshrined. ”

“ To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. ”

“ We need to keep our historical memories not only fresh but true. For, in the words of the great historian, with the remembrance of whom I began these lectures: ‘The healthy nation has a memory as well as aspirations involved in the consciousness of its identity ”

“ His memory is like one of those historical paintings, where Virgil and Dante sit side by side conversing. These perspectives and foreshortenings are a great barrier between peoples. It is ever so difficult for a person of one tradition to remember what is contemporary in the tradition of another.
Almost nothing that goes by the name of Historic Rights or Historic Wrongs can be called a truly objective view of the past. Take, for example, the Franco-German debate about Alsace-Lorraine. ”

“ Every year sees wiped out the remains which have lasted for thousands of years past. Now, in our own day, the antiquities of South Africa and of Central and South America have been destroyed as rapidly as they can be found. Elsewhere, engineers of every nation use up buildings as quarries or wreck them for the sake of temporary profit, or for more legitimate purposes as in the submersion of Philae and Nubia. Speculators, native and European, tear to pieces every tomb they can find in the East, and sell the few showy proceeds that have thus lost their meaning and their history. ”

“ With the responsibilities before us of saving and caring for this past life of mankind, what must be our ethical view of the rights and duties of an archaeologist? Conservation must be his first duty, and where needful even destruction of the less important in order to conserve the more important. To uncover a monument, and leave it to perish by exposure or by plundering, to destroy thus what has lasted for thousands of years and might last for thousands to come, is a crime. ”

“ To secure an attractive specimen, a tomb will be wrecked, a wall destroyed, a temple dragged to pieces and its history lost, a cemetery cleared out with no record of its burials. And when carefully authenticated and recorded specimens reach museums, their fate is not yet a safe one, especially in local museums. Stones will be built into walls, and ruined by the damp bringing salt out; objects are left to drop to pieces from lack of chemical knowledge, or from the official dread of the responsibility of doing right instead of allowing wrong. ”

“ Here, too (where all things worn and worthless find their last haven) , among broken crockery and cast-away raiment, are laid the poor worn-out human machines that have finished their hard life-work. Thousands of humblest tombs lie here, half hidden by the shifting sand, and countless thousands of those too poor to raise the simplest monument have here buried their dead in the shallow sand—out of their sight indeed, but by no means beyond reach of the prowling pariahs, always on the scent for hid treasure, seeking what they may devour. ”