A Dear-Bought Victory

“I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price we did Bunker Hill,” Nathanael Greene wrote to the governor of Rhode Island after the battle of June 17, 1775.

Fought on Breed’s Hill outside Boston, Massachusetts, the Battle of Bunker Hill proved a pyrrhic victory for British forces. Confident in their ability to overwhelm the New England militia that opposed them, long lines of neatly uniformed British infantry and marines swept uphill toward a quickly built earthen redoubt defended by a motley collection of farmers, shopkeepers, and tradesmen.

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” the colonials urged each other—or did they? By the end of the fight, the British gained the summit and Colonial forces scattered. One of the patriot leaders, Dr. Joseph Warren, lay dead—one of the first martyrs of the American Revolution. But for the British, the scene was far, far worse: it would be the largest number of casualties they would suffer in any battle of the Revolution. As British General Henry Clinton commented afterward, “A few more such victories would have surely put an end to British dominion in America.”

The siege of Boston would continue, but the sobering lesson of Bunker Hill changed British strategy—as did the arrival soon thereafter of a new commander-in-chief of Continental forces: General George Washington.

In A Dear-Bought Victory: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston, 1775–1776, historians Daniel T. Davis and Phillip S. Greenwalt separate fact from myth as they take readers to the slopes of Breed’s Hill and along the Boston siege lines, illuminating the clash of arms, personalities, and decisions behind a battle that continues to hold a place in popular memory unlike few others.