TODAY’S STARTING POINT
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On June 13, 1775, runaway horses smashed the carriage ferrying Faith Trumbull Huntington, her husband, and other members of her family to what is now Roxbury, where her brother John was stationed with a regiment fighting against the British during the first months of the Revolutionary War. The accident forced the party to hire another carriage, delaying their arrival.
For Faith, the delay would prove fatal.
She and her companions ended up reaching Boston just in time to witness the Battle of Bunker Hill from afar. The battle, which took place 250 years ago today, killed or injured about 1,500 British and American soldiers over a couple hours of bloody fighting. Instead of “the pomp and circumstances of glorious war,” as John recounted, Faith ended up “in the midst of all its horrible realities.” (An artist as well as a soldier, John later painted the above depiction of the battle.)
The experience triggered a deep depression. Despite the interventions of family and doctors, Faith hanged herself five months later.
Faith’s story is a sobering object lesson about a conflict whose brutalities have sometimes been obscured by hindsight. “Over 250 years, the Revolution has taken on kind of a faded sepia tone,” said Rick Atkinson, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who published his latest book about the war, “The Fate of the Day,” in April. “The blood has been leached out of what was in fact a very, very bloody eight years.”
Today’s newsletter explores the many ways in which the Revolution was more brutal for both combatants and civilians than many Americans today remember.
Horrors on both sides
The carnage that Faith Trumbull Huntington witnessed at Bunker Hill was only the start. The war ultimately claimed at least 25,000 American lives, about 1 percent of the population at the time.
Atkinson, who has also written histories of World War II, notes that the overall death toll was nowhere close to that of future conflicts. Still, some battles would have shocked even today’s observers. British casualties at Bunker Hill exceeded 1,000 — all to recapture the comparatively small Charlestown Peninsula. “That’s a staggering figure even by 21st century standards,” Atkinson said.
Yet most deaths during the war came not from combat but from illness. During a single winter at Valley Forge, typhoid fever, dysentery, and other diseases circulating among Patriot soldiers living in close quarters killed nearly 2,000. Poor medical treatment and malnutrition brought on by collapsing supply chains didn’t help.
Other deaths resulted from what we would today consider war crimes. The British anchored cramped, foul prison ships off the coast that subjected captives to rotten food, suffocating heat, rampant disease, and cruel guards. As many as 11,000 Patriots perished on board, more than died in combat.
And then there was the anxiety. For many of the founders, the war itself came on top of more than a decade of civil strife. Until the decisive siege of Yorktown in 1781, battlefield fortunes seemed to swing back and forth. The fighting had disrupted the young country’s economy, leaving George Washington struggling to lead an army full of disgruntled, poorly paid soldiers. In letters, Atkinson said, “you find cries of despair from most of the founders at one time or another.”
‘Brother against brother’
The Revolution wasn’t just a war of independence; it was also a civil war that forced residents of the newly declared United States to choose sides.
During the war, as much as 20 percent of former colonials remained loyal to the British crown. Those who did faced property theft, imprisonment, threats, whippings, exile, and sometimes even execution — conduct we might today classify as a kind of terrorism. In 1778, the Philadelphia authorities made an example of two elderly Quakers who had allegedly aided the British, hanging them despite thousands of their fellow citizens urging clemency.
Internecine atrocities weren’t restricted to the rebels. During one 1780 battle in South Carolina, Patriot forces accused loyalists led by a British commander of having bayoneted soldiers as they tried to surrender. In response, Patriots later committed similar atrocities against loyalists. “This cycle of violence and retribution, which is so common in civil wars, is quite common in the American Revolution,” Atkinson said. “It really is brother against brother, father against son.”
Native people also became embroiled in the violence. The war divided the six nations that made up the Iroquois Confederacy, a political alliance that had controlled swathes of present-day New York for many years. Four nations allied with the British and two with the Americans. In the summer and fall of 1779, Washington ordered the destruction of dozens of British-aligned Iroquois villages, burning crops and displacing women and children. Many of the refugees perished during the harsh winter that followed.
A chance to remember
This year’s parades and reenactments marking 250 years since the Revolution are a chance “to remind people that it really was a war,” Atkinson said.
Facing the war’s horrors has the benefit of reflecting the historical record. But it also need not undermine the lessons in patriotism that many Americans have drawn from it, Atkinson said. “It reminds us that we’re made of pretty stern stuff, even in an age, in 2025, when we sometimes wonder.”
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