The Revolutionary War was fought decades before photography changed the way people far from the battlefields imagined the experience of war. Americans of the revolutionary generation relied on artists for images of battle, often engraved on copper or wood, printed, and sold for modest prices for display in homes or taverns or other public places.

The first published depiction of a major Revolutionary War battle was a modest print titled A Correct View of The Late Battle at Charlestown June 17th. 1775. It was engraved by Robert Aitken, a Philadelphia printer best known for later publishing the first Bible in English ever printed in America, but the publication history of A Correct View does not reflect much piety or even virtue.

A Correct View appeared at a time when Americans were anxious for news and information about the war in Massachusetts. The war had begun with fighting on the road between Boston and Concord on April 19, 1775. By that evening thousands of militiamen had surrounded Boston. In the weeks that followed, Massachusetts authorities formed this militia into a provincial army to lay siege to the British and drive them out of Boston.

On the night of June 16, troops of this eager, inexperienced patriot army occupied the Charlestown Neck, overlooking Boston from the north. They built an earthen redoubt on the top of Breed’s Hill, challenging the British to attack them. They didn’t have long to wait. On the morning of June 17, General Thomas Gage ordered British troops to cross the narrow channel separating Boston from Charlestown and attack the rebel militia.

The resulting Battle of Bunker Hill (so called for the more prominent hill to the north of Breed’s Hill) was a pyrrhic victory for the British. They expected to sweep the inexperienced rebels from the field with one assault. The patriots repulsed the first assault and a second. The hillside below the redoubt was strewn with dead and wounded redcoats. The British succeeded on their third attack, which reached the redoubt after most of the patriots had exhausted their ammunition.

The Americans escaped the Charlestown Neck, having lost some 115 men killed, about 300 wounded, and about 30 taken prisoner. They had killed 19 British officers and more than 200 soldiers. A staggering 62 British officers were wounded, along with nearly 800 of their men. Over one third of the men in the British army occupying Boston were casualties — about the same casualty rate sustained by the Confederate armies at Gettysburg and Chickamauga, two of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. If the fact that only two thirds of the British army crossed over to the Charlestown Neck and were actively engaged is taken into account, the percentage of dead and wounded rises to fifty percent, a casualty rate rarely equaled in any American war.

The British knew the battle was a disaster. General Sir Henry Clinton commented bitterly that “a few more such victories would have shortly put an end to British dominion in America.”  General Sir William Howe, who lost every member of his staff, wrote dryly that “the success is too dearly bought.”  American General Nathanael Greene beamed: “I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price.”  News of the event soon spread through the colonies, fueling the demand for a depiction of the battle.

A Correct View of The Late Battle at Charlestown was the first image of the battle offered to the public. Robert Aitken, who engraved the copper plate from which it was struck, had no personal knowledge of the battle or the topography, but A Correct View is not altogether fanciful — because it was pirated from the unpublished work of someone who knew much more about the battle than Aitken did.

Aitken based A Correct View on a depiction of the battle by Bernard Romans, a surveyor and cartographer, who may have witnessed the battle and who was undoubtedly familiar with the setting. Romans traveled from Massachusetts to Philadelphia that summer and placed an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette on September 20, 1775: “It is proposed to print an exact view of the late Battle at Charlestown, June 17, 1775 . . . on good crown imperial paper, to be delivered to the subscribers in about ten days: The price to the subscribers is 5s. plain, and if colored 7s.” 

Aitken obtained an advance copy of Romans’ print, quickly copied it — without attribution — and offered it for sale in late September, before Romans’ engraving was ready for the public. Aitken also published the engraving in the September issue of his periodical, The Pennsylvania Magazine, or, American Monthly Museum.

Romans was furious. In an advertisement published in the Pennsylvania Ledger on October 7, the frustrated Romans described his view as “much superior to any pirated copy now offered or offering to the public.”  It was too late. Aitken’s cheaper pirated version had saturated the market. The Romans engraving, An Exact View of The Late Battle of Charlestown, sold poorly and is now a great rarity. The Aitken version, produced in greater quantity, is more common, though still much sought after by libraries and private collectors.

Let’s have a look at the two prints, which are very similar but not quite identical. On the right and in the middle foreground, British warships fire in the support of a British assault. Charlestown, at right center, is in flames, as it was after Admiral Sir Richard Howe ordered his warships to fire heated shot into the town, which was reduced to ashes. The British army is advancing in lines, as it did during the disastrous first and second assaults. This tactic was adopted to overawe the rebels and reflected British contempt for their opponents. Only on the third assault did the British resort to the more conventional tactic of advancing rapidly in columns, which exposed fewer men to fire from the redoubt.

Look closely, and you will see that the left flank of the British attack is crumbling under American fire and redcoats are retreating, leaving their wounded on the field. British artillery can be seen, very faintly, between the British infantry and Charlestown. British guns, which should have advanced with the infantry, were supplied with the wrong ammunition and did not advance in support of the infantry until the third assault, after the right ammunition arrived.

There is much in both A Correct View and An Exact View that’s wrong, too. The American position is depicted as a simple fortified line and not a redoubt, and the line includes a gun platform with a cannon firing through an embrasure. In fact, the American engineers who laid out the redoubt forgot to include any embrasures, and artillery was left to deploy outside the redoubt, in positions exposed to naval gunfire.

That brings us to the two rebels standing in the left foreground, one holding up a short sword and the other waving his hat, with his sword visible below the hem of his coat. It would be easy to conclude that these figures are wholly imaginary, but in fact they depict real people. The officer on the left (we know they are officers because they are carrying swords) is Captain John Callender. The one on the right is Captain Samuel Gridley.

Callender and Gridley each commanded a two-gun battery. Early on the morning of the battle, they had been ordered to move their guns into the redoubt, only to find there were no openings in the redoubt for them to fire through. Under orders from William Prescott, commanding in the redoubt, they moved their guns outside the prepared defenses to an exposed position on the hillside and began firing in the general direction of British warships in the channel.

Gridley and Callender soon found that most of their flannel-covered gunpowder cartridges were too large for their guns and that their solid shot was the wrong size. With the British infantry moving forward to attack, they decided to withdraw. Israel Putnam caught sight of the retreating guns and ordered Callender to go back. Callender responded that he had no useful cartridges, whereupon, according to later testimony, “the General dismounted and examined his boxes, and found a considerable number of cartridges, upon which he ordered him back; he refused, until the General threatened him with immediate death, upon which he returned up the hill again, but soon deserted his post and left the cannon.”

After the battle, Putnam demanded that Callender be court martialed for cowardice and “ought to be punished with death.”  The court martial found Callender guilty of cowardice but failed to impose a punishment, leaving that task to the new commander in chief, George Washington, who arrived a few days later. Washington reviewed the case and stripped Callender of his rank, explaining to the entire army that cowardice is “a Crime of all others, the most infamous in a Soldier, the most injurious to an Army, and the last to be forgiven.”

We can be certain that the figure waving his hat in the print is Samuel Gridley, who was described in the court martial as having “fir’d a few times then swung his Hat three times round to the enemy and ceas’d to fire.”  We can be equally certain that the figure with the upraised sword is Callender, because in the Romans print he has the number eight above his head. In the key on the margin, eight is identified as “Broken Officer.”  This is a reference to Callender, whose court martial and conviction were common knowledge in the Continental Army camps outside Boston when Romans was there. Aitken would not have known about Callender or his fate, but copied the figures, leaving the number and the key out of his pirated engraving. 

If the story ended there, it would be one of sadness and shame. But there is more. Even though he had been disgraced and stripped of his officer’s rank, John Callender was determined to serve. He enlisted as a private in an artillery battery and marched with the army to New York. At the Battle of Brooklyn, on August 27, 1776, Callender distinguished himself for valor, refusing to abandon his gun in the face of a British attack even after the captain and lieutenant of his battery fell. Captured at bayonet point, he was imprisoned for more than a year. In September 1777 his wife petitioned the Massachusetts government for help, writing that she and her “four helpless infants . . . through the distress of a kind and loving husband” had been “reduced to a state of misery and wretchedness and want, truly pitiable.”

Callender was exchanged soon thereafter. George Washington vacated the sentence of the court martial and restored Callender to the officer corps with the rank of captain lieutenant (in eighteenth-century ar­mies, the senior officer of a company nominally commanded by the colonel of the regiment was formally a “captain lieutenant” — functionally a captain). John Callender served with courage and honor for the rest of the war.

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