Bunker Hill revisited

Two hundred forty seven years ago today, an amateur Massachusetts militia fought the British standing army on the heights overlooking Boston in what is known as the Battle of Bunker Hill (though actually it was fought on adjacent Breeds Hill.) Though the imperial professionals took the high points after three bloody assaults, the American revolutionaries proved they could withstand a frontal attack in this first engagement of their long war (1775-1783).

The battle was a tactical victory for the British, but it proved to be a sobering experience for them; they incurred many more casualties than the Americans had sustained, including many officers. The battle had demonstrated that inexperienced militia were able to stand up to regular army troops in battle. Subsequently, the battle discouraged the British from any further frontal attacks against well defended front lines.

One of my great grandfathers who made good and then better in 19th century Buffalo, NY, was mightily proud of his relatives' role in that battle and war. E.G. Spaulding had served as town mayor and as a Republican Congressman during the Civil War, sponsoring the desperate Union wartime innovation of federal paper money. (Republicans used to be useful people in a pinch.) 

At the centenary of the battle in 1875, he built this hideous memorial in the local high society cemetery. 

 

The monument is indeed monumental, proclaiming American progress weightily by references to then-trendy Greek classical motifs. The neoclassical pseudo-temple seems merely incongruous today; the Phrygian cap adorned with stars atop a Grecian urn is a symbol which has completely lost its resonance over the last 100 years. But in the 19th century it carried a strong message about a kind of freedom. 

In late Republican Rome, a soft felt cap called the pileus served as a symbol of freemen (i.e. non-slaves), and was symbolically given to slaves upon manumission, thereby granting them not only their personal liberty, but also libertas – freedom as citizens, with the right to vote (if male). Following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, Brutus and his co-conspirators instrumentalized this symbolism of the pileus to signify the end of Caesar's dictatorship and a return to the (Roman) republican system.

These Roman associations of the pileus with liberty and republicanism were carried forward to the 18th century, until when the pileus was confused with the Phrygian cap, then becoming a symbol of those values.

My ancestors were decidedly not "woke." But old E.G. thought this country that his people had fought to create meant something grander than his considerable personal prosperity. 

And in their own time, 19th century rich men had taste as ostentatiously horrible as our current bathroom billionaire.