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Subject: [GENMASSACHUSETTS] Oration Honoring Col. Wm. Prescott by Wm.Everett. Part 3
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2007 15:00:45 EDT



Subject: Oration in Honor of Colonel William Prescott -
Delivered in Boston - by William Everett - Bunker Hill
Monument Association.
Part 3.
p.34
There were men in possession of his ear who might at least have made an
effort to enlighten
his stupidity and soften his obstinacy. When he asked support in his narrow
and harsh supp-
ressions of everything like independence in the colonies or at home, he
found not a few
counsellors whose brilliant talents, thorough training, and wide knowledge
of men, while they
insured the temporary triumph at least of every cause in which they
enlisted, laid upon them
all the heavier responsibility of choosing the right, and acting upon

p.35 ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT.
higher principles than love of office, and reverence for the King's power.
Mansfield, North,
Thurlow, Wederburn, even Lord George Germain, were men of far more than
average talents;
some of them were able to rise to the very highest posts, purely by their
own genius. They]
were wholly beyond the Weymouths, Suffolks and Hillsboroughs, puppets whom
certain American
historians have made prominent merely because they happened to be officially
at the head of
colonial affairs. Yet these men yielded their mighty powers entirely to the
King's orders,
and devised methods with infernal ingenuity to keep Parliament deluded as to
the true con-
dition of America. Everyone of them could have supplied every deficiency in
the Kingt's
intellect if they had thought it for their interest, or even felt an
inclination to tell the
truth. But in every one of them there was a radical want of heart; there was
a want of that
principle which guides the soul by a higher wisdom, how to choose between
two courses where
the mere intellect stands perplexed.

When I contrast the counsellors who confirmed the King in his obstinate
attempt to coerce
the Americans with those who would have led him to a wiser, milder, and, as
I am old-fashion-
ed enough to say, more legal courses - when I contrast Mansfield with
Chatham, Thurlow with
Camden, Wedderburn with Fox, North with Burke, and Sackville with Conway - I
seem like one,
who, in his journey from the low thickets that fringe the gulf of Vera Cruz,
rises to the
broad plateau that surrounds the walls of Mexico. You are still environed by
the luxuriance
of tropical nature - the soil still sustains a gorgeous growth that
transcends all

p.36 COLONEL WILLIAM PRESCOTT.
one sees in less favored lands - but you have left the dank and sickly
jungles whose at-
mosphere is loaded with insidious poison, and where every noise suggests an
envenomed
reptile - and you have ascended to the tempered fervor, the refreshing glow
of the exalted
plains where every breath is a delight6, and the eye slowly climbs to the
glittering summits
of the transcendent peaks that lift it to the very gate of heaven.

I shall not tell again the story of the sad steps wherey Massachusetts was
driven in twelve
years from devoted loyalty to armed resisetance. Pepperell was in line with
her sisters in
protest against the tyranny of the ministry, and instructed her
representative, James
Prescott, the brother of William Prescott, to oppose a firm front to the
proceedings of the
Royal officials.

Pepperell - 1774 - William Prescott appointed Colonel.

As soon as the summons to arms went through the Province, the men of
Pepperell were in
in array. A regiment was formed in 1774, of which William Prescott was
appointed
Colonel, and on the morning of the 19th of April, a messenger rode from
Concord to
Pepperell, arriving about ten o'clock. Colonel William Prescott immediately
ordered the
Pepperell and Hollis companies to march to Groton, whither he himself rode
ahead to arouse
the Groton company; but his ownh neighbors, though five miles further back,
had reached
Groton under arms before their brethren of that place were ready to receive
them, much to
the chagrin of Dr. Oliver Prescott, who did not relish seeing his own men of
old Groton
outstripped by his brother's from the West district. The Colonel hastened
on, with all of
his regiment that he could muster, to Concord, and followed hard upon the
track of the fly-
ing regulars,

p.37 Oration by William Everett.
but did not succeed in overtaking them. He was enlisted, as were most of his
men, for eight
months, and the venerable Dr. Babbidge certifies that every able bodied man
in Pepperell
had followed his call.

On the sixteenth of June a council of war was called in Cambridge by General
Artemas Ward,
commander-in-chief of the colonial troops, a noble historical name,
perverted in meaning
as in spelling by an amiable humorist, who one would think might have found
a name for his
showman without burlesquing the official predecessor of Washington. That
council ordered a
party drawn from the regiments of Prescott, Frye, and Knowlton, to occupy
and fortify Bunker
Hill, promising them relief in the morning. This council was held in the
ancient dwelling to
the westward of Harvard College, which in the next generation had the honor
of shielding
the birth and infancy of our beloved poet, Dr. Holmes. In his childhood he
often heard his
mother tell of the tumultuous escape of her family from Charlestown under
the fire of the
next day, and the boy and the man loved the ancient house which was so
doubly consecrated
by the memories of Bunker Hill. That house, as far as either firmness or
convenience went,
might be standing, and ought to be standing, at this hour. It is said that
it was pulled
down to satisfy the limited taste of a donor to Harvard College, who fancied
the more
imposing modern structure that he erected could be seen better if the lowly
but venerable
house were away. It was a sacrilege! The eye of any trained architect could
see at once
that the quaint and sturdy parsonage grouped in the truest artistic
composition with its
loftier neighbor; and for

p.38 COLONAL WILLIAM PRESCOTT.
its memories and associations, redolent of the most illustrious achievements
and brightest
names of New England in war and peace, the Holmes House ought to be
standing, though every
lawyer in the country were driven to seek the training of his brains in the
Temple, and every
gymnast the exercise of his muscles on the treadmill - that is, the bicycle.

>From the green before that house the detachment set forth, blessed by the
venerable President
of Harvard College; - and like most detachments sent forth under the
blessing of Harvard
College, it fought valiantly and got beaten. It went to Charlestown under
the command of
Colonel William Prescott; under the command of Prescott it remained till the
end of the fight;
and if Prescott had had his heart's desire, it would have returned the very
next night and
retaken the hill, which he had abandoned only for want of proper ordnance
and ammunition.

I do not propose to tell over again the story of Bunker Hill. It has been
told repeatedly
by one and another careful writer and eloquent speaker; but by none more
clearly, more
thoroughly than by our late honored and beloved President, whose statue is
just ready for
erection; honored in the court as in the field, that true heir of the
patriots of 1776 -
General and Judge - Devens.

He told the story on the centennial anniversary of the battle, not merely
with the love and
fervor of a loyal son of the spot, but with the appreciation of a soldier,
as gallant as
Warren, as energetic as Putnam, as experienced as Gridley. When he recounted
the various
events of the night and the day, the redoubt

Oration by William Everett.
p.39
and the parapet, the rail fence and the stone wall, Bunker Hill and Breed's
Hill, going
through the specific part taken by regiments, by officers, by marksmen, he
knew what he
was talking about, as no previous historian or orator, Bancroft or
Frothingham or Webster
could possibly know it. He carried us in detail and yet by system through
the entire en-
gagement, from the original fortification under the eye of Gridley at
midnight, to the
breathless gathering on the Convent hill when twenty four hours had passed
since the
detachment left the college green. There is not a dart of a bayonet, not a
leap of a cannon
ball, not a wound or a death that missed his eye. He pointed out, what less
instructed stu-
dents might see, but what from a trained soldier like him became doubly
historical, that
there was very little command on the day at all - that citizen soldiers,
assembled from
various colonies, enlisted in many regiments, habitually taking orders, when
they took any,
from their own commanders, were not yet disciplined to move as one man at
the word of their
appointed superior; and that much of the fighting on the 17th of June was
rather that of
concentrated guerillas than of organized troops. General Devens's oration
did ample justice
to all those veteran officers who gave their energy and their experience to
marshal, to
organize, to rally the ill-assorted army - Gridley and Knowlton and Pomeroy
and Stark and
Putnam. He brought out, as none can help bringing out, the inspiration
afforded by the
presence of the hero and martyr Joseph Warren. But he distinctly assigned
the name of
commander of the forces that constructed, that manned, that defended

p.40 COLONEL WILLIAM PRESCOTT.
the redoubt to the last, to him whose death we this day commemorate - the
experienced, the
prudent, the fearless PRESCOTT.

When Geneal Devens ceased his centennial oration, the eyes of all his vast
audience were
turned to one of the most remarkable warriors ever produced by any country.
There sat on
the platform, William Sherman, a general whose achievements, equalling in
brilliancy and
persistency those of any of our own earlier heroes, Greene or Morgan or
Scott or Taylor,
have set him second to none of the commanders in our Civil War, Grant or
McClellan or
Thomas, and who has impressed himself even more emphatically on his
countrymen as a man,
a character unique in its stalwart force, so as to require for itself a
place apart from
all comparisons or periods whenever our history is written. On the 17th of
June, 1875, he
rose at our President's call and in a few straightforward, unadorned
sentences, expressed
what every descendant of the early founders of New England must feel on the
soil of Bunker
Hill, what every American feels on the battle ground where our independence
was established,
and then as a soldier pronounced his own independent opinion as to the
honors of the battle.
He gave all due credit to Warren and to Putnam; but he said of William
Prescott, that he was
the commander, and that he was the only one who exercised the functions of a
commander t
throughout the day.

>From that sentence, pronounced by such a soldier at such at time, there can
be, there ought
to be, no appeal. Nor did a different view prevail during the life time of
William Prescott.
It was not till long after the death

p.41 COLONEL WILLIAM PRESCOTT.
which this day commemorates that any serious attempt was made to reverse the
judgment of
General Heath, himself of the council of war at Cambridge, or to revive and
strengthen the
statement of the funeral eulogist of General Israel Putnam, who undoubtedly
played a con-
spicuous part on the higher summit, and to invest him with the glory of
command.

General Putnam has always been a prominent figure in the eyes of his
countrymen, for the
part he took in the war of the Revolution. There is something about his
sturdy, fiery temper,
which seems the very type of the Yankee, who could play the three parts of
farmer, legis-
lator, and soldier in three days, to the equal and entire satisfaction of
his own people.
He was certainly prominent on the day of Bunker Hill; he certainly held at
that time the
commission of Brigadier General in the extemporized army; and it is perhaps
not very strange
that some of his old comrades, coupling the two things fifty years later,
should have made
him out to have had the chief command. Yet I cannot avoid saying that those
who cherish the
fame of General Putnam seem to me to make a mistake in dwelling on his
exploits at Bunker
Hill or attempting to weave from them an especial crown of laurel.

Such orders as he did give, such contributions as he did make, seem to me to
have shown more
alacrity than judgment; and if Colonel William Prescott really were under
his orders, he
derived very little help and much embarrassment from his alleged superior.
It is no very
grateful duty to have to draw comparison between two men of tried valor and
unquestioned
patriotism. But the work that gave Bunker Hill the renown it bears; the

p.42 COLONEL WILLIAM PRESCOTT.
defence through the long day of the breastwork and the reboubt against
reiterated attacks,
one and another triumphantly repelled; the final dogged resistance up to the
last possible
moment; the steady retreat at length, solely because Putnam and Putnam's
superior had failed
to furnish the needed ammunitiion - this gallant, this glorious, this
immortal work was
achieved under the eye and by the command of William Prescott, and him alone.

In a letter to John Adams, about two months after the battle, Colonel
William Prescott gives
a very concise but very clear statement, with a precision worthy of Julius
Caesar, of the
eventful day. He speaks of himself as directing the entire movement, and
alludes to no other
commander. He would have fought if possible more bravely than he did, if he
had known that
on the heights of Braintree, ten miles away, stood Abigail Adams with her
son John Quincy
Adams, then eight years old, watching the smoke as it rose from Charlestown,
and explaining
to her boy what meant those distant fires.

If there is any glory in that day, if, as at Thermopy-lae, the victor for
the moment was the
vanquished in the result; if the shaft on the spot enshrines more memories,
and awakens
more memories, and awakens more emotions than the lion of Waterloo or the
bridge of Lodi;
if Bunker Hill is as unalloyed a source of exultation as Dorchester or
Trenton, as Saratoga
or Yorktown, or alloyed by the loss of Warren alone, it is because we had on
that day,
commanding men unused to military orders, unwilling to do anything for a
master, but ready
to do all for a leader, one whose prudence, whose keeness, whose daring

p.43 COLONEL WILLIAM PRESCOTT BY WILLIAM EVERETT.
whose endurance, and a nameless power to impress himself on his fellows, may
rank him with
the chiefest paladins of our war, with Allen or Montgomery, with Marion or
Morgan, a Wayne
without his rashness, and an Arnold without his treason.

Colonel William Prescott's service continued till the end of 1776; his
regiment formed part
of the Continental army in the Campaign of New York, being posted at a
critical point in the
defence of the city, and withdrawn with a care which his son informs us
received the special
commendation of George Washington. But after 1776 we cease to hear of him in
command of a
regiment, though he appears as a volunteer in campaign on the upper Hudson.
His withdrawing
from the field of arms seems to h ave been hastened by a serious injury,
contracted in some
of his farming operations at Pepperell.

In the later years of his life, he was frequently elected to the General
Court of Massa-
chusetts, and in the insurrection of 1786, was charged with its suppression
in Middlesex
County, where he appeared at Concord prepared for action. He was one of
those characters
which entirely apart from any acquired distinction are sure to be favorites
in a New
England village. Large, athletic, open in his look, generous in his temper,
hearty and
eager to listen to the call of friendship to an extent that injured his own
fortune, he
lived to the last, loved and honored in his own town, not merely for what he
had done but
for what he was - a man who could not help charming all who knew him.

To be continued Part 4 - Col. Wm. Prescott's marriage.
Transcribed by Janice Farnsworth




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