NEW HAMPSHIRE MEN AT BUNKER HILL AND BENNINGTON. 241
��NEW HAMPSHIBE MEN AT BUNKEB HILL AND BENNINGTON:
��BY HON. S. T. WORCESTER.
��The opinion widely prevails in this State that no history of some of the ear- lier and more important battles of the Revolution, yet written, does full justice to the New Hampshire troops engaged in them. Emphatic expression is given to this sentiment in an interesting paper contributed by Prof. E. D. Sanborn to the November number of the Granite Monthly, with the above caption.
In that paper, Prof. S., with unques- tioned truth says : " That at Bunker Hill the New Hampshire regiments under the command of John Stark and James Reed were among the best fighters in the bat- tle." Again, after stating that at the commencement of the action, Prescott's men had been diminished to seven or eight hundred, Prof. S. further says that the historian " Bancroft concludes that not more than 1500 men participated in the fight, and if so, a majority must have been from New Hampshire."
It is not proposed in this article to say anything of the proportion those two New Hampshire regiments bore to the whole number of American troops engag- ed in that battle ; but it would be a nat- ural, not to say a necessary inference from the paper of Pof. S., that the only New Hampshire soldiers known or sup- posed to have participated in it were those two regiments commanded by Cols. Reed and Stark. But there still exists an abundance of the best evidence that such was not the fact. An inspection of the original company Rolls of Col. Pres- cott's own regiment, still preserved in the office of the Massachusetts Secretary of State at Boston, will show that one full company ot hi& regiment were New Hampshire soldiers from the town of Hol- lis, and also that there were four other Hollis soldiers in the company of Capt. Moor in the same regiment. Besides these men from Hollis, it is shown by the
��same original Rolls that in other compa- nies in this regiment there were seventeen men from Londonderry, eleven from Mer- rimack, six from Raby Cnow Brookline), and others from other New Hampshire towns, making in all not less than one hundred, or more, New Hampshire sol- diers. As the article of Prof. S. is whol- ly silent in respect to these New Hamp- shire soldiers in this regiment, and as no known history of this State or of the bat- tle gives New Hampshire, or the towns above named credit for them, it may be a pertinent supplement to that article of Prof. S. to tell briefly the story at least of that portion of these New Hampshire men who went from the town of Hollis.
Hollis (spelled Holies in the town char- ter, and all the early town records), was on the south line of New Hampshire, about forty-five miles N. W. of Boston, and twenty-three from Concord, Mass., as the roads were in 1775. By the Prov- ince Census, taken in September of that year, it then contained 1255 inhabitants, being next to Amherst the most popu- lous town in Hillsborough county.
Late at night of the 18th of April, the detachment of British troops under the command of Lt. Col. Smith, crossed over from Boston Common to East Cambridge on their march to Lexington and Con- cord. The alarm of this expedition, as is well known, was at once spread through the country by mounted messen- gers. According to a well established tradition, the news of it was brought to Hollis early in the morning of the 19th, by Dea. John Boynton, who lived in the South part of the town, near the Prov- ince line, and was a member of the Hol- lis u Committee of Observation" — who came riding through the town at the top of his horse's speed, calling out to his townsmen, as he passed, " The Bed Coats are coming and killing our men /" Riding
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