WITH REMARKS ON
FROTHINGHAM’S HISTORY OF THE BATTLE.
With an Appendix.
BY S. SWETT.
BOSTON:
PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON,
21, School Street.
1850.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by
S. SWETT,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
Thirty-two years since, though without any pretensions tobe an author, we consented to write an account of BunkerHill Battle, as a feeble contribution to the monument of famethat history owed our ancestors. But, we find, one may bean author in spite of himself; we have been compelled toaddress the public repeatedly in defence of our history,though never before with so great reluctance. By this timewe hoped to enjoy the privilege of age, to exempt us fromthis task; and, notwithstanding our friendly regards forMr. Frothingham, and a high appreciation of his book forits intentional honor and honesty and successful research, weshall be obliged to notice at least one of his mistakes. Forhe is under the same ban as all our race: “to err is human.”And were his mistake solitary, it would compensate for thatby its magnitude, nay, its sublimity. According to him, thegreat Battle of Bunker Hill was fought, on our side, by aheadless mob; and, to prove this, he adduces the most incontrovertibleargument in the world, were it true,—that thearmy at Cambridge, which had been for two months collectingand organizing under the able and experienced Gen.Ward, assisted by a host of accomplished veteran officers,was itself a mob. He terms it, by a new-invented name,“an army of allies;” a misnomer, calculated to misleadhis readers in regard to its organization. On the files of the[4]Provincial Congress, and by the Committee of Safety, it istermed the New England army; and, in the gazettes of theday, the American army. Gen. Putnam, he says, wouldhave been the commander in the battle, had the army been“regularly organized;” but, because “it had not yielded tothe vital principle of subordination,” he was present as apatriotic volunteer. He has treated Gen. Putnam’s characterwith the utmost candor and kindness, as animals destinedfor the altar are pampered, to be sacrificed at last.
It will be our duty to enter into a thorough investigationof this subject of the command, though with great repugnance,on account of its involving the rival claims of Putnamand Prescott. For both those heroes we entertain the mostdevoted admiration, and the deepest interest in their fame.Could we have imagined that any such discordant claimsmight be advanced, our history had never been commenced.In our numerous conversations with Judge Prescott on thesubject, we never discovered their existence until our historywas published. He had presented to the Athenæum Gen.Heath’s Memoirs, as a declaration, we presumed, that thestatements in them relative to his father were correct; and toHeath’s opinions we subscribed. We have contented ourselvesheretofore with a simple statement of the facts thatwere known relative to the command; but an historian isbound to state the principles, as well as the facts, relative tothe characters he introduces, and the legitimate conclusionsresulting from those facts and principles,