The Battle of Bunker Hill still holds lessons for today

On June 17, we mark an important and overlooked day in American history, the Battle of Bunker Hill. On this day in 1775, Englishmen began shooting each at each other; it had begun weeks before at Lexington and Concord, but was done in earnest upon the slopes of Breed’s Hill in what would be the first set battle of the American Revolution. As with so much of our almost 250-year legacy, there are lessons to be drawn from our past for our present, as well as from the men and women who enabled such lessons.

There are differing reasons for American Colonists’ decisions to take up muskets and swords against their countrymen. Some cite the Stamp Act (think tariffs), or the Tea Act or Sugar Act (think taxes). Documents of the time, however, show that while such policies added to Colonial frustrations, they were not the core reason, which was a fundamental question: Who would govern and would a free-born people be allowed to govern themselves? It was about a people on one side of the Atlantic thinking that the ideas that they had brought with them from England, written down in the 1628 Petition of Right and the 1689 Bill of Rights, and even the Massachusetts Charter of 1691, all assented to by English kings, were sacrosanct.

The ruling class in England, however, viewed such beliefs as regressive, smacking of Cromwell’s England. But more so, they viewed the Colonists’ actions as a challenge to Parliament’s right to govern every corner of the British Empire, including to change on a whim charters or constitutions if it felt the right to do so.

My book, “The Adversaries: A Story of Boston and Bunker Hill” highlights the nine months before the Battle of Bunker Hill, as events rapidly escalated towards violence, and why men fought that day on the heights above Charlestown and would continue to fight for another six years. It is about the beginning of the American Republic, a country that while not always true to its founding principles, aspired to something that many of us now take for granted — liberty first and forever.

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