“Warren step’s beyond their path”

When Ezekiel and Sarah Russell put together their “ELEGIAC POEM” about Bunker Hill, they didn’t stint. Their customers didn’t get just sixty woodcut coffins and four columns of poetry.

The Russells also provided “An ACROSTIC on the late Major-General WARREN Who was slain fighting for the LIBERTIES of AMERICA”:

J ust as JOSEPH took his flight
O nward to the realm of light,
S atan hurl’d his hellish darts,
E vil angels played their parts;
P iercy, Burgoyne, Howe, and Gage,
H over about infernal rage:

W ARREN step’d beyond their path,
A w’d by none, nor fear’d their wrath;
R an his race to joy and rest,
R ose amongst the loyal blest;
E nter’d in the rolls of fame,
N orth and Devil mist their aim.

To squeeze full value from that poem, it was also reprinted in an almanac for the following year.

The image above shows John Norman’s frontispiece for Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s play about Bunker Hill published in Philadelphia in 1776, another early portrayal of Dr. Warren as a martyr.

Fall of a Hero Reading, 8 Dec., Boston

Tomorrow night—Wednesday, 8 December—there will be a free public reading of Fall of a Hero, a play about Dr. Joseph Warren. The playwright is Thomas Fleming, author of Now We Are Enemies, about the Battle of Bunker Hill, and many other books of Revolutionary history.

This reading is co-sponsored by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center and Boston Playwrights’ Theater, both part of Boston University. It will take place in the back theater space at 949 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. The event starts at 7:00 P.M., and Tom Fleming will be on hand to take questions from the audience afterward.

There’s a long tradition of American dramatizations of the battle for the Charlestown peninsula, starting in 1776 when “a Gentleman of Maryland” published The Battle of Bunker’s Hill: A Dramatic Piece of Five Acts, in heroic measure through the Philadelphia printer Robert Bell.

The author was Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816, shown above), who had moved from Scotland to Pennsylvania as a boy and managed to get into Princeton, where he became friends with Philip Freneau and James Madison. In 1776 he was in Maryland running an academy, and The Battle of Bunker’s Hill was first performed by his students. The next year he supplied them with The Death of General Montgomery at the Siege of Quebec.

In 1777 Brackenridge served as a chaplain in the Continental Army, and the next year started publishing the United States Magazine in Philadelphia. It failed, so he studied law under Samuel Chase, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Maryland.

In 1781 Brackenridge settled in Pittsburgh, where he was finally a big fish in the pond. His Pittsburgh Gazette evolved into the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and his Pittsburgh Academy grew into the University of Pittsburgh. He represented the region in the state legislature, and tried to mediate the Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s, opposing both the whiskey tax and the violent response to it. From 1792 to 1815 Brackenridge published a rambling novel of frontier life called Modern Chivalry, and in 1799 he became a judge on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.