Episode Details

The British called it a victory. It nearly destroyed them. On June 17th, 1775, the King’s regulars marched up a hill outside Boston three times into the muskets of New England farmers, and walked away having lost more than a thousand men, the bloodiest single day the British army would suffer in the entire war.

This is the episode that teaches you how an 18th-century battle actually worked, the smoothbore musket, the held volley, the bayonet, the terrible discipline of standing still while a wall of men fires into you. It is the lens for every battle still to come. And it is the story of Doctor Joseph Warren, the physician who ran the Boston resistance, who was handed command of the army on that hill and refused it to fight in the line as a common volunteer, and what the King’s soldiers did to his body when they found it.

The British took the hill. They came down it afraid. And a Virginian was already riding north to take command of the men who had made them bleed.