With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution

by James L. Nelson

On June 17, 1775, the entire dynamic of the newborn American Revolution was changed. If the Battle of Lexington and Concord was, in the immortal words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "shot heard round the world," Bunker Hill was the volley that rocked Britain's Parliament and the ministry of King George III to its core. The Battle of Bunker Hill was the first hostile engagement of the Revolution between two organized armies, and the first time that a genuine American army had ever taken the field. It gave the British their first inkling that the Colonial rabble-in-arms they had envisioned might actually prove to be a formidable fighting force.
In this book , award-winning author James L. Nelson tells the exciting and dramatic story of the fight that changed the face of the American Revolution. He looks at the events leading up to that fateful day, the personalities on both the British and American sides who made momentous decisions, and the bloody outcome of those crucial choices, which would affect the British strategy on the battlefield throughout the coming six more years of active warfare.
A masterful new history of the first set-piece battle of the Revolutionary War, With Fire and Sword offers critical new insights into one of the most important actions of our country's founding.

Genres: History, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Nonfiction, American History, Military History, American

364 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2011

About the author

James L. Nelson (1962-) is an American historical nautical novelist. He was born in Lewiston, Maine. In 1980, Nelson graduated from Lewiston High School. Nelson attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for two years, and then transferred to UCLA, with the ambition of becoming a film director. Nelson, his wife, Lisa, and their daughter Betsy lived for two years in Steubenville, Ohio, while Lisa attended Franciscan University. They also have two boys, Nate and Jack. They now live in Harpswell, Maine, where Nelson continues to write full time.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book that meets the task of explaining the start of the American Revolution. I especially appreciated learning about Dr Joseph Warren and his role in the beginning. How would our history be different if he had survived the battle is a question to ponder. The author only spends 70 pages on the actual battle, augmented by excellent maps. He leads you to the fighting with clear recounting of events like the Boston Tea Party:

…merchant John Rowe, anticipating how things would end up, posed the question to those around him, “Who knows how tea will Mingle with salt water?”

Rotch reported that the governor would not relent, that the tea ship, could not sail. The crowd began to jeer and threatened to turn on Rotch before they were calmed. Rotch was asked if he would, on his own volition, send his ship to sea, but he replied that he could not, that doing so “would prove his ruin.” With just hours to go before the deadline, the Patriots had only one option left. Sam Adams stood and announced, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.”

That did not mean there was nothing more that the Sons of Liberty could do. Indeed, that pronouncement was apparently a prearranged signal, and as soon as it left Adams’s lips, “a number of brave and resolute men, dressed in the Indian manner, approached near the door of the assembly, and gave a war-whoop, which rang through the house.” This was followed by shouts from the gallery of “Boston Harbor a tea-pot tonight!” and “Hurrah for Griffin’s wharf!”

None of this was spontaneous. Adams and the others had made arrangements for a gang to disguise themselves as Indians for the purpose of tossing the tea into Boston Harbor. The “Indians” were young, working-class men, mostly apprentices or journeymen, who had blackened their skin with grease and soot and lamp black, dressed in old blankets, and armed themselves with tomahawks and axes. It’s not clear how many there were, but their numbers were likely somewhere between twenty and fifty.

If they were not enough, there were plenty of other willing hands to pitch in and help.

I was not aware there was a second Boston Tea Party:

On March 6 the brig Fortune arrived in Boston with thirty chests of tea aboard. If there was any thought that Bostonians were feeling remorse for their actions of the previous December, it was answered the next day when sixty men in Indian guise went aboard the brig and dumped her cargo of tea into Boston Harbor. “The owners of the tea are very silent, Hutchinson reported to Dartmouth, and would probably not press charges even if they knew who perpetrated the crime. The original consignees of the tea destroyed in the first Tea Party were still hiding out in Castle William, and the current owners did not care to join them.

Dr Warren was fanning the flames of revolution while also recognizing the British leader(s) were not the devils he painted them as:

From those meetings of the committee of safety came a circular letter to be sent to the other towns in Massachusetts….It was written by Warren in the doctor’s most inflammatory style. “The barbarous murders committed on our innocent brethren, on Wednesday the 19th instant, have made it absolutely necessary that we immediately raise an army to defend our wives and our children from the butchering hands of an inhuman soldiery” who would, he wrote, “take the first opportunity in their power to ravage this devoted country with fire and sword.”
Warren urged the towns to immediately enlist men and send them on to Cambridge. Speed was urgent. “Death and devastation are the instant consequences of delay. Every moment is infinitely precious. An hour lost may deluge your country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity who may survive the carnage.”

In fact, Warren did not really believe any of the wild hyperbole that was flowing from his pen. The commander of the “inhuman soldiery,” Thomas Gage, was a man he knew personally and had met with on several occasions. Joseph Warren may have looked on Gage as his enemy, but he knew full well that Gage was not going to deluge the country in blood. Indeed, far from it; Gage’s biggest fear was that the violence at Lexington and Concord would continue, and he worried that the rebel leaders were actually promoting it.

Gage certainly was…exactly right in his belief that some leaders wished to continue provoking the British army into action and to escalate the fighting into a war that would not be easily negotiated away.

On the day that Warren wrote his inflammatory circular calling for more troops, he also wrote a very reasonable letter to Gage asking the general how many days he would allow for people to remove their personal effects from Boston if they decided to abandon the city. “I think it of the utmost importance to us,” he wrote to Gage, “that our conduct be such as that the contending parties may entirely rely upon the honor and integrity of each other for the punctual performance of any agreement that shall be made between them.”

How did 13 loyal colonies come to declare independence from the most powerful empire on earth? Great explanation here:

The playwright George Bernard Shaw observed, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” So it was in Massachusetts in the fall of 1774.

General Thomas Gage was a reasonable man trying to obey his orders in the context of the political situation he found. John Andrews, no great friend of government, admitted that “the Governor is dispos’d to preserve peace among us, and that he intends to observe a strict and impartial administration of justice, so far as he is permitted to act himself.”

Those whom Gage was up against—Sam Adams, Joseph Warren, Paul Revere, William Molineux, and the other radical leaders in Boston—were not reasonable men. There was no hyperbole too great for their propaganda, no conspiracy too wild for them to promote in the cause of Amer can liberty. No act of intimidation was too extreme unless in its extremity it risked backfiring. The very idea of colonial self-rule was nearly unprecedented in the history of the world, and the Patriots were committed to that goal with a fervor that no hired soldier or government official (and Gage was both) could ever match. Passion, in those men, quite eclipsed reason.


If you want excellent accounts of the first battle of Lexington and Concord read this one: The Minute Men: The First Fight; Myths and Realities of the American Revolution by John R. Galvin

A more detailed account of the Battle of Bunker Hill is this one: Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill by Thomas Fleming

[John Nellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book on the battle of Bunker Hill. The book tells of all the events leading to rebellion, and the battle itself. I found it very informative. It had lots of first person accounts, and help put many events in perspective.

[William Olenick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first new book on Bunker Hill I have seen in awhile. The author lays out a great introduction/ Preface and then goes into the events that flared in the colonies leading to the first full battle of the American Revolution. There are only two maps included which is always a drawback with history books. Using Google to reference this area is not helpful as the landscape is vastly different than during colonial times. Overall I would recommend this to readers learning about the war.

[Craig Merkel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read at least 4 books about this period of American history and this is by far the best. Excellent research and story backed by facts really makes it interesting. Not to dismiss other books on this time period and personalities involved but I would recommend it as a FIRST before reading others assuming you are (like me) wont to get several viewpoints on a subject before feeling you have a good grasp of the subject. In other words if you only read one book about it-read this one.

[Watchdogg · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution by James L. Nelson
Published March 1, 2011

GR blurb -
On June 17, 1775, the entire dynamic of the newborn American Revolution was changed. If the Battle of Lexington and Concord was, in the immortal words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "shot heard round the world," Bunker Hill was the volley that rocked Britain's Parliament and the ministry of King George III to its core. The Battle of Bunker Hill was the first hostile engagement of the Revolution between two organized armies, and the first time that a genuine American army had ever taken the field. It gave the British their first inkling that the Colonial rabble-in-arms they had envisioned might actually prove to be a formidable fighting force.
In this book , award-winning author James L. Nelson tells the exciting and dramatic story of the fight that changed the face of the American Revolution. He looks at the events leading up to that fateful day, the personalities on both the British and American sides who made momentous decisions, and the bloody outcome of those crucial choices, which would affect the British strategy on the battlefield throughout the coming six more years of active warfare.
A masterful new history of the first set-piece battle of the Revolutionary War, With Fire and Sword offers critical new insights into one of the most important actions of our country's founding.

My thoughts
I've read a number of books on the American Revolution as fought in defense of the Hudson River and of the importance of the promontory that would eventually become home to the USMA at West Point.

I've read a lesser number of books relating to what led up to the war and the goings on in Boston during that period. This book provided a tremendous amount of information that helped fill in the gaps of my understanding of that pre-all-out-war period. As such, this is an easy 5-star read for me.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book. Read many histories of the early days of our American Revolution.
When I learn new details, it’s a fantastic experience and there were many new ones that fundamentally added to my understanding of the characters, the why’s, wherefore’s and the how’s!
Family entanglements or relationships form a core to the web of history and the author enlightened this reader on more than a few like the friendship between Dr. Warren and Paul Revere along with marriages between important players.
Strategically, the fight at Lexington/Concord and the battle of Bunker/Breed Hills quite possibly won us the entire Revolutionary War as the author explains.
Whether a novice to those far away days or an experienced dweller in our past, there's value for all!
The writing style is flowing like a good novel and the reader is not ever bored.
Editing is professional. I could only desire a few more maps but the two maps are excellent.
I really wish this book had not ended until we emplaced our artillery on the Dorsetshire Heights causing the British to get out!
But, that’s another story and hopefully also told by the author!
The only thing really missing are some decent photographs :-)

[Joe L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine writing on the first three months of the American Revolution/War of independence.
This volume also covers the encounters at Lexington and Concord (more skirmishes than battles).
If you’d like to read about this period of April-June 1775 and those three events, choose this book. It does a good enough job detailing people and places without bogging in the details, as can easily happen here.
This is a great first book on the American revolution if you’ve never read a book on the subject before.
4/5 stars.

[William Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

After finishing, this has become one of my favorite books on the American Revolution. A quick page-turner at around 320 pages, the book covers not only the Battle of Bunker Hill but the events and key figures involved in the start of the American revolution. I would highly recommend this to any enjoyer of history.

[Christopher Lutz · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 Definitely the better of the two books I read for Bunker Hill’s 250th anniversary. I appreciated the in depth analysis of the weeks after Lexington and Concord but before Bunker Hill that explained the origins of the first American Army and how we don’t know who actually created it. The battle itself was handled quite well and was easy to picture mentally as it developed. Recommended

[Bill White · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant research, superior writing and an engaging style make this an excellent way to learn some history. Nelson’s research is flawless and incredibly in-depth. I really enjoyed and at the same time learned about this under-taught segment of American history. Bravo!

[William Gallagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must Read

This was an amazing coverage of not only the battle itself but events leading up to it. History buffs and military/war book buffs will thoroughly be entranced. Just an excellent bok from start to finish.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book brought an entire new outlook to the American Revolution and the forming of this great country of our!

[Nat Bond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nelson is as good at history as he is at fiction!

[Henry Kline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great detail on the Battle of Bunker Hill. Some of the early chapters were out of order chronological order and that made them a little confusing

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely one of the clearest reads of any of the history books I have read in the past twenty years. Nelson's writing made me feel as if I were there watching the battle unfold. Just be aware though that the title does contain the phrase "and the Beginning of the American Revolution". Only toward the end of the book does the account of Breed's Hill occur. I also thought that the two maps included in the book were top-shelf and found them very useful. This was a perfect read before our trip out to Boston this summer and more of Nelson's books will definitely find their way onto our shelves.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am certain there was a lot of research put into this book. It was not a bad book at all. However, as I mentioned in another review, it is hard for me to compare this to Decisive Day by Richard Ketchum. I will admit I am very biased to that book.

I was disappointed in the fact that this book spent so much time leading up to Bunker Hill and that time frame. More than half the book was about the time leading up to Bunker Hill. I guess that is in the title but I was expecting the book to focus more on Bunker Hill.

[Deane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very engaging read. Wonderful treatment of the beginnings of resistance in Massachusetts to the Battle of Bunker Hill. Of particular significance is the information about the orgins and development of the American army between April and June, 1775, which I have not encountered in other works. And we are presented with a new set of American heros; Joseph Warren, Israel Putnam, and William Prescott, who seem to have been largely ignored in more conventional histories.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book from my friend Greg McEathron. Great to know the details that no one had time for in high school! The old story about the battle of Bunker Hill actually being on Breed's Hill is actually not true. The bump on Bunker Hill where the action took place took on the name Breed's Hill well after the actual battle. The author does a good job of blending local details and 'the big picture' of the evenets at the start of the American Revolution.

[Glenn Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent account of the Battle of Bunker Hill. The book actually starts with the account of Boston of the ten years leading up to the battle and the role of the leaders, mainly Joseph Warren and Israel Putnam on the American side and Generals Gage, Howe, Clinton and Burgoyne on the British side.

Very well researched and well worth the time.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well worth a read. Nelson does a good job of fleshing out the human nature of the main personalities involved in the what/why/how questions involved in any historically significant event. This author puts a lot of thought into it, as well as researching it from original source material, and then tieing it all together into a very readable atory.

[Richard Brylczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution
by James L. Nelson is a well-written narrative of the events of the early American Revolution that resulted in the Battle of Bunker Hill.It asserts several facts of which I was not aware despite my history of reading Revolutionary War history books. Well worth reading for those interested in that era.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book on the events leading up to, and the event of the battle of Bunker Hill. It's a fascinating period of our nation's history, and Nelson has a writing style that keeps you engaged for the entire book. I recommend it!!

[Brian Durfee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Nelson's maritime adventure novels so I thought I would give some of his non-fiction work a try. This was a good start. Learned a lot about old colonial Boston and the beginning of the Revolutionary war.

[Aubrey Dustin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very detailed history. I was able to write an effective study of mission command using background information from this book. All pertinent information on the battle is here in a very clear and easy to read voice that kept my attention.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book summarizing the events before and during the battle of Bunker Hill.
It also talked a lot about somebody I'd never heard of, Dr. Joseph Warren.
This book is good for those who would like a greater understanding of the events that occurred during Revolutionary War.

[Richie Moran]

library

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clearly told history with details I had not been aware of. The author's use of correspondence from the participants added flavor and authenticity.