Mercy Leroux

On a battlefield, especially one beset by smoke not just from muskets but from an actual conflagration mowing down Charlestown, it’s going to be difficult to establish just who killed whom. Chaos is the nature of war. Still, parts of Bunker Hill were certainly fought in close combat, and that’s given rise to certain reports that Person X killed Officer Y… but did they?

Let’s look at three oft-reported specific killings.

Salem Poor and Major Pitcairn

We did choose to portray Salem Poor as killing Major Pitcairn in We Are Not Strangers, but in truth, no one knows for certain. There were early rumors of a Black man named Salem killing Major Pitcairn. Attempts to identify that man first primarily landed on Peter Salem, but further investigations reveal the stories were almost certainly referring to Salem Poor. And Salem Poor clearly did something significant during Bunker Hill, such that his service was used to convince George Washington to allow Black men to serve in the Continental Army.

However, the details of those early rumors that cite a man named Salem killing Pitcairn also put Pitcairn as climbing the redoubt when he was killed, which he almost certainly was not. So are those stories completely unreliable?

Possibly. But also possibly not; just because a story has some details wrong (even if it is a major detail) does not inherently mean that all details can be discounted. Human memory is especially fallible, but there are very many reliable memories too.

Verdict: plausible but far from certain.

Salem Poor and Lt. Colonel Abercrombie

Though this story did circulate, Abercrombie himself wrote that he was wounded by friendly fire from the light infantry, and that’s hard to imagine anyone saying if they didn’t believe it was true (and he would likely have known, given the position from where he would have been hit). Hence, there’s no real reason to believe this.

Verdict: almost certainly not true.

Lord Rawdon and Joseph Warren

Oddly, Wikipedia and an abundance of blogs report that Lt. Lord Rawdon (or a servant of his) fired the shot that killed Joseph Warren.

This video does a good job of laying out the type of weapon that would have killed him, and explaining why suspicion should fall on an officer’s servant, who was reportedly “cut to pieces” after doing so. However, the officer is never identified.

Per the letters of Hugh Percy, the Colonel of Rawdon’s Regiment, Rawdon’s fame during the battle came come from taking over command of his grenadier company after his captain, George Harris, was shot in the head and fell into Rawdon’s arms. Rawdon’s actions helped save Harris’s life, and he then led the company over the redoubt. I cannot trace any source to say that Rawdon was involved in Warren’s death, which leads me to suspect someone just made assumptions given his rise to fame during Bunker Hill, and the idea spread from there.

Now, Rawdon does write that he was glad Warren was found dead after the battle, but he never mentions either that he killed him or saw the death. Nor does he mention the death of his servant. Lord Rawdon himself was not exactly shy in writing about his escapades during the war, or indeed about anything at all, which does make Mercy side-eye whether he really would have kept quiet if he was the one who shot Dr. Warren. Then again, considering the chaos and heavy smoke of the battle, whoever shot Dr. Warren may have been entirely unaware of whom he’d shot.

Curiously, there is a remark in History of the Northumberland Fusiliers that Capt. Benjamin Baker, the lieutenant whose position Rawdon took, claimed to have killed Warren, but no source is provided for this.

Verdict: unknown but not likely.

Next week, we’ll look at the life of the officer who is going to be the through-line in our series (in other words, one character will appear in every story). Any guesses?