The Battle of Bunker Hill (1/14)🧵

On the night of June 16, 1775, over a thousand men assembled at Cambridge and marched under the cover of darkness to the Charlestown Neck. They were ordered to build fortifications on Breeds Hill and Bunker Hill, and hold the strategic high ground overlooking Boston Harbor. (2/14)🧵
A well placed artillery position overlooking the harbor to bombard British forces occupying Boston could force them to abandon the city.

Colonel Richard Gridley made a plan to build a small redoubt on Breed’s Hill. Americans dug through the darkness and by dawn, their work was visible to the surprised British warships.

Cpl. Peter Brown with the colonials wrote, “We worked there undiscovered till about five in the morning, then we saw our danger, being against ships of the line, and all Boston fortified against us.”

The British warships then opened fire. The shelling did little damage to the fort but it did shake the nerves of the inexperienced colonial militia. They were mostly new to war, unlike the elite soldiers of the British empire.

Sherman’s Legions: Campaign in the Carolinas. (January–April 1865)

The men of the Union Army had a special vendetta against South Carolina, they felt that they were responsible for starting the war. Many homes and non-military related items were destroyed or stolen. This behavior was justified by a union private, “Here is where treason began and by God, here is where it shall end!”

A Civil War History thread 🧵 During Sherman’s march to the sea, nearly 300 miles from Atlanta to Savannah, Grant ordered Sherman to tear up the railroads upon which Lee depended for supplies, Grants orders to Sherman were as follows, “You will clean the country of railroad tracks and supplies. I would also move every wagon, mule, hoof of stock, as well as the Negroes.”

In other words, Sherman was to leave nothing that could support the confederate war effort. Sherman’s march across the interior of Georgia was one of the most successful campaigns of the war, shattering confederate morale.