The 1777 March of the Saratoga Convention Army

Sixteen year old Ezra Ross of Ipswich, Massachusetts, likely feared he might die on several occasions before July 2, 1778.  On December 19, 1775, he had enlisted in Colonel Loammi Baldwin's 26th Continental Regiment.  In the year that followed, his regiment would take part in the Siege of Boston, Washington's unsuccessful attempt to defend New York City from a British invasion, and the Battle of Trenton before their enlistments expired on December 31, 1776.  In August of 1777, Ross would either volunteer or be drafted to serve again, one of the two-thousand Massachusetts militiamen called for to reinforce the Northern Army under the command of Major-General Horatio Gates. [1]    Eight months later, and just a few weeks before his seventeenth birthday, he faced certain death. [2]   Ross, along with Sergeant James Buchannon and Private William Brooks of the British 9th Regiment of Foot, and Bathsheba Spooner of Brookfield, Massachusetts , had been convi...

As the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution continues, a recreation of the Battle of Bunker Hill has been planned for the weekend of June 21 and 22, 2025, (albeit in Gloucester, Massachusetts, twenty-five miles northeast of the actual site, due to the urban nature of Charlestown in the 21st century, its organizers indicate).  As is the case with the Battle of  Lexington  and Concord , there are multiple connection between the events of June 17, 1775, and the Massachusetts militiamen who escorted the Convention Army from Saratoga to Massachusetts in 1777. Perhaps the most dramatic of these connections is one of the men associated with the order  "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes."   Historian and author J.L. Bell, creator of the Boston 1775 blog, examined the origin of this quote in detail in a June 17, 2020, article in the Journal of the American Revolution .  Bell traces the Bunker Hill order story back to 180...