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ArcGIS Pro Map Package for Battle of Breed’s Hill

Happy 4th of July! After publishing the List of Americans in the Battle of Breed’s Hill from the Rolls last year, I had intended to also publish the ArcGIS Pro map I used as part of the research to compile the list. Today, I am finally sharing that here today.

Download: Battle of Breeds Hill Troop Locations and Movements.

The above link will open the ArcGIS Online homage page for the map package. In the upper right, click Download, and then in ArcGIS Pro, use the Import tab to add this map to your Pro project.

Included in the Map Package

  • Layers for the initial deployment of troops and artillery at the regiment and, when it was needed, at the company level.
  • Layers for locations of troops and artillery during the initial phase of the battle.
  • Layers for locations of troops and artillery during the final phase of the battle
  • Muster of the names of the Americans who fought (note this is not as current as the spreadsheet in the List of Americans in the Battle of Breed’s Hill from the Rolls.

Requirements

This map package requires using ArcGIS Pro version 2.8 or newer. ArcGIS Pro is available as Part of university site licenses or, like I use it, via the Personal Use Account.

I advise having at least an intermediate or greater level of experience/comfort using ArcGIS Pro to get full value from this map. In particular, skills to query tables within a moderately complex relational data model are needed.

Posted on by Charlie Frye · 6 Comments

List of Americans in the Battle of Breed’s Hill from the Rolls

This is a roll of who was or likely was in or at the June 17, 1775 battle. It is not exact, complete, or the last word. The early historians Swett, Frothingham, Loring, et al. agreed that there is no basis for compiling an exact list. I completely agree with them, though we can compile useful from all of the available information.

Americans in the Battle of Breed’s Hill from the Rolls – Feb 2024Download
Method for Compiling Battle of Breed’s Hill from the Rolls (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20817.75367)Download

Newly available in April 2026: Interactive map for locating patriot soldiers on the Breed’s Hill battlefield: Battle of Breed’s Hill Patriot Locator. This map is based on recent research aimed at revising and improving the locations of the British units.

I intend this roll as a 21st-century digital convenience. It is for those who wish to get a faster start researching patriot ancestors, town histories, etc.

Beyond appearing in each of the state rolls, there were two criteria for including soldiers in this roll:

  1. There was a “positive” statement of their being in the battle. This included being a casualty, prisoner, losing items, or being specifically listed on a roll as in the battle. There is a “Positives” column in the Company Summary tab reflecting the count of soldiers with a positive statement.
  2. The dates of service include June 17, 1775.  This is not positive proof, but proof of the potential to have taken the field. Typically, this was a roll taken between June 18 and August 2. These rolls gave enlistment dates in April, May, or June, and durations of service. There were a few rolls taken before the battle that established a term of service after accounting for those who marched and served for the April 19, 1775, alarm.  Many men who marched on April 19 went home within a week and did not return to the siege.  It is also worth noting omissions to the state rolls. There were quite a few soldiers who served from late April or early May only until the end of July and were not part of the Continental Army. There are cases where the Aug 1st Massachusetts rolls were not taken or did not survive, and I would assert as many as 250 men were not included in the state rolls or this digital version of them. There were also dozens of soldiers who fought but were from other units that are not recognized as marching. These men were on details or among friends and chose to march with their companies and regiments. There were also men who marched, took the field, and then were sent on duties, or left, and went back to camp. Such men are included as they were on the field at a time when others were in physical and mortal danger. The Company Summary tab has two fields 1B and 1A that indicate Y or N for a roll before the battle (1B) or a roll with service dates after the battle (1A).

Last, on the company summary tab, there are fields for phases and zones. Phases represent the three British offensives during the battle. Zones represent areas of relative conflict. Zone 1 is the accepted main line of battle, including the range of a musket on either side of where that line moved. Zone 2 is the rest of the Charlestown Peninsula, which required an act of bravery in and of itself to march onto via the Charlestown Neck. Zone 3 is the area beyond the Charlestown Neck including Lechmere Point. General Ward sent units to guard against a second landing of the Regulars. Col. Paul Dudley Sargent noted unfavorable winds also prevented this landing. However, these troops took casualties from cannon and grapeshot from the floating gondolas and smaller ships that could make their way deeper into the Back Bay.

If you note some one is missing or wrongly included, please email me at duty_liberty@mail.com, or comment on this blog – I generally can respond within a day or two. Follow this post to be notified of updates, which are listed below.

-CEF

Updates:

3/15/2021: Added Captains Abraham Dodge and Ezra Lunt from Col. Moses Little’s regiment.

3/14/2021: Removed most men from Capt. Abel Wilder’s company of Col. Doolittle’s Regiment – only part of the company was there. Added Capt. John Harnden’s company of Col. Bridge’s regiment. Added several individuals found due to improving the quality of the Massachusetts rolls file. Removed three duplicated soldiers.

3/10/2021: Added several from Connecticut.

3/9/2021: Added Daniel Shay

4/21/2022: Added Henry Farrington and Ichabod Farrington – previously omitted due to garbled OCR in Massachusetts rolls file.

2/29/2024: Learned of Samuel Bradish of Abel Wilder’s Company in Doolittle’s 18th Mass. Regiment. In Bradish’s record, the service dates included the battle and that he was wounded. I was surprised to see these service dates had been omitted from Capt. Wilder’s record. Based on this, I added Bradish and 44 additional soldiers from Wilder’s company. These men were predominantly from Winchendon and Royalston, with a few from Boston and Lunenberg.

Posted on by Charlie Frye · 1 Comment

Improved text for searching MA Soldiers and Sailors

The scanned text of 17 volumes of Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, a Compilation from https:archive.org, was difficult to search through because there were so many errors, including misrepresented names, broken words, and garbled entire pages of text.

Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War v1-17Download

After several years of gradual progress, I have completed the work to correct hundreds of thousands of systematic errors in the OCR (optical character recognition) process is complete. Each record is now on one line in the file with no breaks, making it a better basis to determine the composition of companies or regiments at various times, inventory of which towns the soldiers were from, traits of soldiers from rolls that described the men (hair, eyes, height, ethnicity, occupation, etc.; and which men were in specific battles — in the form of a positive claim containing the words like killed, wounded, captured, or lost items or a tacit claim for being in the unit at the time of the battle.

The original “text view” was copied into files for each volume. I processed those files using Python to remove the arbitrary end of lines, thus concatenating the text for each soldier. My goal was to be able to do wildcard searches per soldier such that I could find matches between company commanders and regiment commanders. For instance, searching for “ilder.*Doo” would find men in Capt. Abel Wilder’s company., Col. Ephraim Doolittle’s regt. That syntax is for Notepad ++. I got tired of doing that manually in each of the 17 volumes. This also addresses not having to search across volumes for sound-alike names such as Ayres and Eyres.

This is a large file – STRONGLY RECOMMEND using in Notepad++ or do a bit of programming in Python (DO NOT ATTEMPT IN: NotePad, WordPad, or even MS Word). Both Notepad++ and Python support wildcard and extended character searching, e.g., “\n\r”. Notepad++ is limited to one wildcard, so for complex sequences, Python is the only option (using the regex library and conditional logic to mimic an SQL query with multiple WHERE clauses).

Removing end-of-line characters described above generally worked, but issues with the OCR process resulted in many false interpretations of characters and unintended insertions of new lines. So, I also started replacing some of the safer sequences:

Daxiei to Daniel x4
Daxiel to Daniel x68
Aakon to Aaron x3
Reubex to Reuben x 35
AxLEX to Allen x7
Johx to John x452
JoHx to John x63
Jamks to James x7
AVigglesworth to Wigglesworth x36
Woodbridjje to Woodbridge
Bexoxi to Benoni x5
Bexjamix to Benjamin x98
Williaji to William x70
Joxathax to Jonathan x51
Lejiuel to Lemuel x5

If you are tempted to do similar, please be aware that many seemingly safe find/replace pairs will produce unintended changes Use Find first to locate a large number of prospective changes to be certain of avoiding changing valid information.

Sometimes the OCR process in combination with a poorly printed page created a mess. For instance:

An^TT.w SPr-eant Capt. Joseph Uichards’s co.; enlisted Aug. 11, 1779; ser'”‘^”^^ZZ 3 a”;n^.’detach,nent under Capt. Samuel Fisher at Rhode Island.

Should be:

Allen, Abijah, Sergeant, Capt. Joseph Richards’s co.; enlisted Aug. 11, 1779; service 1 mo. 3 days with detachment under Capt. Samuel Fisher at Rhode Island.

Thus, if you’re looking for specific person, the scanned version on archive.org is your best option.

-CEF

Posted on by Charlie Frye

Freeman’s Farm: The more I read …

For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing the scenes during the Battle of Freeman’s Farm. The perspective is from inside the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment; imagining what it was like to be in the ranks, commanding platoons and companies, and orchestrating the positioning of a regiment on that battlefield.

Most histories are written from a bird’s-eye view with the occasional tidbit coming from the diary or memoir of one of the men on the field. No complaints as those are great reads for getting introduced to the events and people involved. That said, between such histories and paintings of these battles, both new and old, something has been troubling me. How is it, given that each side had roughly 3,000 men, each man roughly twenty cartridges, and fired most of them over the 4-6 hours they were on the battlefield, that there were only a little over 1,000 total casualties?

Do that math:  The Americans fired upwards of 60,000 bullets, and maybe 1,000 found an enemy soldier. The British fired about the same number and only hit half as many Americans.

For having fired a musket and demonstrated, hundreds of times, how a firelock works, while explaining the range and just how far off target they could be at a distance of 75 yards, I was still surprised by these numbers.

As I considered the possible reasons for this, some notions of what must have been happening, strategically and tactically, began to develop.  First, the 18th-century battlefield was more like a chess match than a shooting gallery. Colonels and captains had to preserve their troops by maneuvering on the field with the dual intent of catching their enemy within range of their muskets.

Sidebar:  Is the right word musket or firelock?  If Google’s NGram Viewer is reliable, it looks like it was similar to “flip phones” versus “cell phones”. It seems that firelocks were a specific new form of the musket class of weapon. 

Smoke from firing volleys, providing the fog of battle to hide movements, was only the beginning. Advancing or retreating while firing volleys by platoon allowed for relatively high rates of sustained fire to push groups of enemy troops out of the way, or respectively slow their advance.  Getting close enough, perhaps by flanking (coming around to the side of an enemy’s formation), to warrant a bayonet charge while your enemy reloads was a tempting and dangerous goal. Execute poorly and the tables could be turned rather quickly.

Given that, my respect has risen considerably for the American Colonels (Cilley, Scammell, Cook, Adams, and Hull) who directed their men in the field around Freeman’s farm against Burgoyne and Hamilton on this day 241 years ago. These men did not just rush onto the field ala Mel Gibson (as Benjamin Martin or William Wallace) and clash with their enemy. One of the consistent recollections by the men who were there was of the tremendous amount of musketry.  That meant firing volleys, advancing, wheeling, and retreating if no advantage was gained.

Another thing to take into account was the likelihood that Morgan’s riflemen, and the Jaegers who carried rifles, accounted for a double-digit percentage of the casualties. There were points during the battle where the fighting came to hand-to-hand combat. Both of these facts imply that those muskets accounted for even fewer casualties than the 1 in 60 that my initial estimate suggested.

Consider that not all men on either side were killers. Aiming a firearm with the intent of taking a life is no small thing. Given all the smoke, there were certainly times when finding a target was impossible–just point into the smoke and pull the trigger when commanded to fire.

It seems only one man in five or even six fired a shot that struck an enemy that day. The credit for keeping the American casualties so low goes to the officers who guided their troops on the field and in the woods while they fought for something more than a sixpence.*

-CF

* From a Henry Dearborn quote: “But we who had Something more at Stake than fighting for Six Pence Pr Day kept our ground til Night, Closed the scene, & then Both Parties Retire’d”

Posted on by Charlie Frye · 3 Comments

Philip Schuyler: Crisis Manager

As I researched how Sullivan’s Brigade made its way north from Albany to Fort Ticonderoga in the late spring of 1776, I came across a remarkable document. It was a project plan sent from Major General Philip Schuyler to his commander, General George Washington describing the number of men needed, and their roles in transporting food 185 miles from Albany, NY to the Continental troops in Quebec based at Fort St. Jeans.

Schuyler learned of the need for food in a letter from Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase, two of Congress’s commissioners in Quebec, dated 11 May, 1776. They wrote, “We are unable to express our apprehensions of the distress our Army must soon be reduced to from the want of provisions, and the small-pox.”

Separately, Brigadier General John Thomas, who was now in command of the Continental Troops in Quebec wrote Brigadier General Benedict Arnold also in Quebec, on May 8, 1776 appraising him of the need of provisions in Canada:

“I shall make a stand here with a small number of men. I have but two days’ provision, and will bring them to half allowance, and remain on the ground myself till I can hear from you.”

Much of the route was over water, but to get from Albany to Fort George at the southern tip of Lake George, several overland carriages were required, including the longest at fifteen miles. The plan spelled out exactly how Schuyler would to transport barrels of pork and flour, enough for 10,000 men in about two and a half weeks.

As a mapmaker and product engineer at a software company, I learned project management is a vital skill, but I had myopically thought that skill to be a modern, i.e., 20th century competency. Schuyler’s plan shows a high level of proficiency, and his organization and efficiency of expression are also noteworthy.

Below is my transcription of Schuyler’s plan, where I have inserted additional lines to make use of right side of the page similarly to Schuyler’s original.

[1776, May 24]

An estimate of the number of men necessary to transport provisions for 10,000 men from Albany to Canada specifying the manner in which it is conveyed.

10,000 Weight of Pork is …… Barrels …  50
10,000 Weight of Flour is  ……   …….        55
add for sundries               ……..  ………….   15
To leave Albany each day ……   ………    120
At Albany the provisions is put into bateaux capable of carrying 13 Barrel when Hudson’s River has plenty of water, but henceforward only ten Barrels will be carried in each bateaux – Thus it will take 12 bateaux, but I have stationed 14 between Albany & Half moon (which are about ten miles apart) to make up for rainy days and accidents. Each of these bateaux is navigated by 3 men

…….  42 (men)

From Half Moon it is conveyed in wagons to Stillwater, the distance is 12 miles. From Stillwater it is conveyed to Saratoga (12 miles farther) in 14 boats.

…….  42 (men)

From thence it is carried two miles by land to McNeils

……  42 (men)

And four bateaux receive it there, and convey it to Fort Miller which is about 3 1/2 miles.

……  12 (men)

There is a land carriage of half a mile above the falls. Thence it is carried in 14 bateaux and the river being frigid & incommoded with rifts or small falls, each boat must have 4 men, the distance is about 8 miles.

……..   56 (men)

From Fort Edward it is carried to Fort George by land / distance 15 miles.

  Sub total  ……..  152 (men)

On Lake George, we have a flat bottom boat with sails, which will carry about 200 barrels and allowing five days for a trip, she carries at a rate of 40 barrels a day & is navigated by 11 batteaus carrying 30 barrels each & navigated by seven men,

…….  8 (men)

working a trip in four days – convey at the rate of about 82 barrels the length of the lake 36 miles.

…… 77 (men)

From the North end of Lake George it is conveyed 1 1/2 miles by land to Lake Champlain, where it is put in one bateaux making 4 trips a day and carried to Ticonderoga, the distance about 1 1/2 miles.

……. 7  (men)

On Lake Champlain we have two schooners, a sloop, and Row Galley which may carry about 600 barrels and make a voyage to St. John’s (about 120 miles in ten days, which is at the rate of 60 barrels a day navigated by sailors assisted by about

…… 30 (men)

For the remaining sixty barrels per day it will take 20 bateaux carrying 30 barrels each making a voyage in 10 days navigated by 8 men each.

……  160 (men)

total ……. 434

Allow for sick, lame, & lazy …… 66

Total of  ….. 500

A guard at Half Moon of privates: 12
A guard at Stillwater of privates: 12
A guard at Saratoga of privates: 24
A guard at McNeils of privates: 12
A guard at Fort Miller of privates: 12
A guard at Fort Edward of privates: 12

560

At the landing at the north end of Lake George and at the North side of the carrying place:

48
At crown Point: 24
Fort George should not by any means have a garrison of less than 200
Ticonderoga should have a like number: 200

Total 1,060

For opening Wood Creek & repairing Roads: 232

Total: 1,300

Colo. Van Schaick’s Regiment by last: 425
Colo. Wynkoop’s Regiment supposed at last: 300
Hired Bateauxmen: 100
Total: 825

If no flour is to be sent it will reduce the number of men to be employed in bateaux to about 250… If therefore about 250 men were sent to the six posts it would suffice.

The scans of Schuyler’s plan are available online at the Library of Congress’s collection of George Washington’s papers.

Another reason this plan is noteworthy is that it was not previously transcribed like much of the collection, and thus, not text searchable, so unless you are specifically searching for this, you would be unlikely to find it. I happened to be searching for all correspondence between generals Schuyler, Sullivan, and Arnold during May of 1776, trying to determine their whereabouts and the location of Sullivan’s troops as they moved north from Albany.

In The War has Begun, I wrote of how Quartermaster Isaac Frye and the 3rd NH Regiment played a role in implementing this plan as they moved north from Albany in May of 1776 to support the Continental troops already in Quebec.

Citations:

George Washington Papers, Series 4, General Correspondence: Philip J. Schuyler to George Washington, May 24, 1776, with Estimate of Men. 1776. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <https://www.loc.gov/item/mgw444852/>.

Force, Peter, 1837, American Archives: Fourth Series Containing a Documentary History of the English Colonies in North America, from the King’s message to Parliament, of Mar 7, 1774 to the Declaration of Independence by the United States.  Series 4, Volume 6. M. St. Clair Clark and Peter Force Under Authority of an Act of Congress, Passed on the Second of March, 1833. Washington D.C. p. 482 (letters from commissioners and General Thomas)

George Washington Papers, Series 4, General Correspondence: Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase to Philip J. Schuyler, May 16, 1776. 1776. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <https://www.loc.gov/item/mgw444803/>.

-CEF