FOREWORD
Had the British bullet that went through the hat of Major Samuel Lawrence of Groton near Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775 been aimed a bit lower, some thousand descendants of Major Lawrence would not have been born and I should not now have his dispatch wallet, nor his letter explaining the battle and mentioning General Dearborn, my first wife’s ancestor. The Bunker Hill Monument might not have been built; the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company might not have been developed; various charitable institutions might not have had adequate financial support and the dams at Waltham, Lowell and Lawrence might not have been constructed to provide the power to operate textile mills. John Brown might not have been sent by the Emigrant Aid Society of Boston to Kansas, where he called his camp Lawrence, now one of the flourishing cities of Kansas. Had Major Lawrence been killed we should not have had a Lawrence as Mayor of Lowell, or as Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Two Bishops of the Episcopal Church, a President of Harvard College, the present Senator Saltonstall, and many young men and women now actively interested in the problems of our nation might never have been born and I should not have qualified for membership in the Society of the Cincinnati.
From reflecting upon the bullet that came so close to disposing of Major Samuel Lawrence at Bunker Hill I was led to the history of the monument commemorating the battle, in the building of which his son—and my great-grandfather—Amos Lawrence took a leading part. Much has been written about Bunker Hill Monument, but the splendid article by Mr. E. H. Cameron in The Technology Review for May 1952 and June 1952 summarized its history so well that I was anxious to have it available in more permanent form. Mr. Cameron and the editors of The Technology Review very kindly gave permission for this reprint, and Mr. Walter Muir Whitehill, Director and Librarian of the Boston Athenæum, has seen the pamphlet through the press. Mr. Whitehill has also selected the illustrations, and has included in them a hitherto unpublished drawing, owned by the Boston Athenæum, of Bunker Hill Monument under construction in 1837. This was obviously the source for the somewhat inaccurate wood engraving published in The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, III (1839), 404 and subsequently reproduced in later accounts of the monument. The illustrations include portraits of the two largest individual contributors to the building of the monument—Amos Lawrence and Judah Touro, the Jewish merchant of Newport, Rhode Island. I am grateful to the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company and the Redwood Library and Athenæum of Newport for furnishing photographs of these portraits and permitting their reproduction, and to Mr. T. Temple Pond, President of the Bunker Hill Monument Association, for allowing this reprint to be published by the Association.
John S. Lawrence