A Dear-Bought Victory: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston, 1775-1776

BOOK REVIEW: A Dear-Bought Victory: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston, 1775-1776 by Daniel T. Davis and Phillip S. Greenwalt (Savas Beatie, 2026) $16.95 Paperback

Studies of Revolutionary War battles tend to focus disproportionately on only a few of the clashes that occurred during the eight-year-long war. The Battle of Bunker Hill is one example, the subject of at least ten readily-available non-fiction books. With that in mind, it is reasonable to ask what another book about the battle has to offer.

A new title from publisher Savas Beatie, part of their Emerging Revolutionary War series, offers two advantages over the many other titles available: it is current, and it is concise. A Dear-Bought Victory: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston, 1775-1776 doesn’t present any newly-discovered information or unusual perspectives on the famous battle. What it does do is bring together much of the most recent information from other writers, thereby not repeating some of the common misunderstandings about the action. And it does so in a very compact format, taking the reader from the beginning of the siege of Boston in April 1775 to the British evacuation of the city in May 1776 in just 117 pages, not counting several appendices.

This concision is an advantage for those new to the battle who want an easily-digestible account of the events that led up to it and followed it. The narrative begins on April 20, 1775, in the aftermath of the opening conflict of the war, with a five-chapter discussion of the early stages of the siege of Boston and the specific events leading up to the battle. Four further chapters describe events from July 1775 through March 1776. But treating such a broad range of events makes the book less suitable for those seeking in-depth information. Only two chapters are devoted to the fighting for the peninsula on which Bunker Hill stands, and while the material presented is accurate and aligned with recent research, it is nonetheless brief and lacking in discussion, analysis or original research.

Advertisement

An appendix describing a walking tour of locations relevant to the battle is an unusual feature that many readers will find quite useful. The remaining four appendices, short essays written by different contributors, discuss a curious assortment of topics only tangentially related to the book’s theme. One wonders if a six-page study of the famous—but probably apocryphal—order, “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes,” could be effectively condensed to a few sentences in the narrative. The same question applies to the ten pages devoted to Boston’s liberty tree. The appendix on Benedict Arnold’s march to Quebec seems particularly out of place in a book about the siege of Boston. There is, on the other hand, only passing mention of the battle’s name; a good essay explaining why Bunker Hill is the appropriate name for this action would have been welcome.

The book has a few minor errors, such as incorrectly identifying an officer as belonging to the 52nd Regiment of Foot and later correctly putting him in the 5th Regiment. Issues like these are common in history books, and in this case do not detract from the overall accuracy of material. The lack of an index does make details like these less apparent, as well as making it more difficult to use the book as a reference.

An order of battle—which follows the appendices but is not titled as an appendix—lists regiments but gives no indication of their strengths. It lists the commanders of the British grenadier and light infantry battalions, but does not include those battalions as separate entities or describe their composition. Rather than a clear order of battle, it is simply a list of regiments that were involved in the battle, followed by a list of British regiments that were in Boston.

In a crowded field of literature on a popular topic, A Dear-Bought Victory is a useful title for anyone new to the first year of the war in the Boston area. Those who seek a deeper study of the Battle of Bunker Hill, and especially of the nine months that followed it, will be better served by other more extensive volumes.

Advertisement

PLEASE CONSIDER PURCHASING THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON IN PAPERBACK or KINDLE.
(As an Amazon Associate, JAR earns from qualifying purchases. This helps toward providing our content free of charge.)