Capt. Ebenezer Bancroft and the Embrasures

With the anniversary of Bunker Hill coming up, I’m going to share some accounts of that battle, said to be from eyewitnesses. And in most cases I’m sure they really are from eyewitnesses.

The first comes from Ebenezer Bancroft (1738-1827) of Dunstable, Massachusetts, who was a captain in the provincial army. It was reportedly “written from dictation in 1826” by Bancroft’s grandson John B. Hill of Mason, New Hampshire, and printed for the first time in The Granite Monthly in 1878.

That magazine said it had taken the text from proofs of Hill’s Sketches of Old Dunstable, which was never published as a stand-alone book. Instead, Hill’s material was appended to a much shorter address that nevertheless gets top bibliographic billing: Bi-Centennial of Old Dunstable, by S. T. Worcester.

Here’s the start of Bancroft’s account:

On the night of the 16th of June, 1775, my company was ordered out with the detachment to take possession of the heights of Charlestown. This detachment consisted of three regiments commanded by Col’s [William] Prescott, [Ebenezer] Bridge and [James] Frye, and amounted in all to between 1000 and 1200 men. These regiments were principally from Middlesex county, Col. Prescott from Pepperell, Col. Bridge from Chelmsford, Col. Frye from Andover. I was that evening on a court-martial and could not get liberty to go with my company, but in the morning of the 17th General [Artemas] Ward granted me permission to join my company, though the court-martial was not through.

Soon after I reached the hill our men left work and piled their intrenching tools in our rear, and waited in expectation of reinforcements and refreshments, but neither reached us, if any were sent. The reinforcements halted at Charlestown Neck. Whilst I was standing by the redoubt before the action began, a ball from the Somerset passed within a few inches of my head, which seriously affected my left eye so that it finally became totally blind.

When the works were planned no calculation was made for the use of cannon, and of course no embrasures were left for them. But on the morning of the 17th two ship cannon were sent up and a platform with them. About ten o’clock the British troops began to make their appearance at the wharves in Boston.

General [Israel] Putnam, who had been incessant in his exertions through the morning to bring reinforcements, now rode up to us at the fort and says: “My lads, these tools must be carried back,” and turned and rode away. An order was never obeyed with more readiness. From every part of the line volunteers ran and some picked up one, some two shovels, mattocks, etc., and hurried over the hill.

When the pile of tools was thus removed I went through the lines to form an estimate of the number of men in the redoubt, at the same time stating that those who had gone with the tools would come back, though I was by no means confident that they would. I estimated the number then left in the redoubt at 150, but was afterward informed by one of the captains of Col. Frye’s regiment that he counted them, and the whole number, including officers, was 163. I was not certain that any reinforcements after this time came into the redoubt; thus the number of our effective force was very materially reduced. General Putnam had given his orders and gone, and nobody seemed to think it belonged to him to stop the men and execute the order in a proper way.

The artillery-men had all gone with the tools, and Col. Prescott came to me and said, “If you can do anything with the cannon I wish you would. I give you the charge of them.” I directed the men to dig down the bank in order to form an embrasure, which they were forced to do with their hands, for the party that had carried off the intrenching tools had not left us a single shovel or mattock. Men never worked with more zeal. Many of them dug till their fingers bled. To loosen the earth I loaded the cannon and fired into the gap, and they dug again, and I fired a second time. Both these balls fell in Boston, one near the meeting-house in Brattle square, the other on Cornhill, as I was afterward informed by Boston gentlemen.

The first time I read a retelling of that anecdote, it sounded like the provincials fired point-blank into the earthen wall to create the embrasures, and I recall at least one author expressing doubt that anyone would ever do that. Bancroft’s (or Hill’s) words suggest that the men started the excavate the openings by hand, and he fired the cannon through the narrow hole they opened in order to make it easier for them to widen. As to whether those shots reached all the way into central Boston, that still seems dubious.

TOMORROW: What effect did those cannon have on the battle?

The Gridley Legacy: From Louisburg to Cobble Hill

Continuing my quotation from Alexander H. Everett’s 1836 oration on the Battle of Bunker Hill, here’s how he described the action of Maj. Scarborough Gridley of the Massachusetts artillery:

Major Gridley had been ordered to proceed with his battalion from Cambridge to the lines; but had advanced only a few yards beyond the neck, when he made a halt, determined, as he said, to wait and cover the retreat which he considered inevitable.—At that moment Colonel [James] Frye [1709-1776], whose regiment was in the redoubt, but who, being on other duty, as I remarked before, had not yet joined it, was riding towards the hill, and found Major Gridley with his artillery in the position I have described. Frye galloped up to him and demanded what it meant.—

“We are waiting to cover the retreat.”—

“Retreat?”—replies the veteran, “who talks of retreating?—This day thirty years ago I was present at the taking of Louisburg, when your father with his own hand lodged a shell in the citadel. His son was not born to talk of retreating. Forward to the lines!”—

Gridley proceeded a short distance with his artillery, but, overcome with terror,—unequal to the horrors of the scene,—he ordered his men back upon Cobble Hill to fire with their three pounders upon the Glasgow and the floating batteries.

The order was so absurd that Captain [Samuel Russell] Trevett refused to obey it, and proceeded with his two pieces. He lost one of them by a cannon shot on Bunker Hill: the other he brought to the lines. This little fragment of Major Gridley’s battalion, was the only reinforcement of artillery that came into action.

At another point Everett explained, “In the war of 1745, when Massachusetts alone raised an army of three thousand two hundred men for the expedition against Cape Breton, he [Richard Gridley] commanded the artillery, and with scientific accuracy pointed the mortar which on the third fire threw into the citadel of Louisburg a shell that occasioned its surrender.”

Everett later incorporated his oration into the short biography of Dr. Joseph Warren published in Jared Sparks’s Library of American Biography. It’s the earliest mention I’ve found of either Richard Gridley’s mortar marksmanship at Louisburg or his son’s excuses at Bunker Hill. Everett didn’t state his sources, but from then on those statements were in the American historical record.

The picture above is Bernard Romans’s “Exact View of the Late Battle at Charlestown,” published in Philadelphia in September 1775 and provided by the National Archives. The artillery commander in the foreground shooting toward a warship, labeled “8,” is identified by the key atop the color version  (available at the John Carter Brown Library) as “Broken Officer.” However, Romans wasn’t on the scene, and that figure might be confused with a different American artillerist, not Scar Gridley.

The performance of the American artillery corps at Bunker Hill is a major part of my talk at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., next Tuesday: “Washington’s Artillery: Reengineering the Regiment Between Bunker Hill and Dorchester Heights.”

TOMORROW: Three artillery captains and one general on Bunker’s Hill.