Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 7
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 7
The chords of memory may be mystic, as Abraham Lincoln described them, but how accurate and reliable they are as evidence is a dilemma every historian must face. From the time Herodotus walked through Asia Minor two thousand years ago, asking questions, tapping the recollections of hundreds of eyewitnesses, historians have depended on the retentive faculty of the human mind for information about the past, and they have learned that such reliance has its minuses as well as pluses.
I first encountered the negative side of how much to lean on an eyewitness’s memory when I was doing research for the book Decisive Day, about the battle for Bunker Hill.
Considering the number of people who saw that 1775 engagement, as either participants or onlookers (most of the latter on the housetops of Boston a mere third of a mile away), it is astonishing that so few credible contemporary accounts have survived. The best of these are British; from the American side one of the most complete chronicles is a document prepared shortly after the battle by three clergymen and submitted to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety for transmittal to Great Britain, obviously for the propaganda impact it would have. But this is not what you’d call a historian’s delight, since the young pastor who did most of the writing saw only snatches of the engagement from an unsatisfactory vantage point on the Malden side of the Mystic River.
Given these circumstances, it was essential to look to other sources, and one that appeared promising at first blush demonstrates the potential risk of depending on memory. In 1825, fifty years after the battle, when the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument was laid, some 190 survivors of the Revolutionary army attended the festivities. Of these, 40 had been, or claimed to have been, present on the fateful seventeenth of June, 1775, when the British stormed the rebel redoubt. The directors of the Monument Association, hoping to obtain a full picture of the events of that day and clear up disputed points about what happened, decided to tap this lode by collecting depositions from the battle veterans.
For reasons that are unclear, the results lay fallow for seventeen years. Then, in 1842, three volumes containing these depositions were donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a committee of three was appointed to report on the nature and historical value of the acquisition. The committee’s findings were dispiriting, to say the least—so much so that the volumes were ordered sealed and “deposited in the Cabinet as curiosities.” The explanation given for such short shrift appeared in a report by the historian George Ellis, a committee member who had examined the testimonials with care. His remarks are worth quoting.
The contents of the three books, he observed with a mixture of shock and anger, were “most extraordinary; many of the testimonies extravagant, boastful, inconsistent, and utterly untrue; mixtures of old men’s broken memories