About 40 years after the Battle of Bunker Hill, all New England was deeply stirred by a pamphlet published by Major General Henry Dearborn who had taken part in the engagement. The pamphlet accused General Israel Putnam, one of the most revered of the Revolutionary heroes, of incapacity and cowardice in the battle. Thereupon, the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought over and over again, at the wharves, sail lofts and ropewalks of Boston, and in all places where men gathered to work and to talk about the events of the day. Crowded nine inside and five on top of the jolting four-in-hand stagecoaches from Boston, friends and foes of the popular Revolutionary hero would wrangle over his conduct at the battle. It would be a long argument, at five miles per hour, with little room for gestures. With tankards in hand, by the warm fireplace in the low-ceilinged tavern of the village where the coach would stop for the night, the passengers could express their convictions more forcefully, and the Battle of Bunker Hill would become a very live topic indeed. The furor over the Putnam-Dearborn controversy became secondary, however, as the bald fact was realized that, aside from a small wooden column, no memorial existed on the site of one of the most famous military engagements of American history. In the good Yankee fashion a group of prominent citizens conferred over their Madeira wine and coffee on ways to correct this humiliating situation, and in the year 1823, these men formed the Bunker Hill Monument Association, to solicit private contributions sufficient to build a monument on Breed’s Hill, where the battle had been fought, in the town of Charlestown, now a part of the city of Boston, Mass.[1] [1] From the start, the site of the battle seems to have been called Bunker Hill, although it was actually fought on Breed’s Hill. The probable reason for this inaccuracy is that Bunker’s Hill was then 110 feet high, and the adjacent 62-foot-high Breed’s Hill was considered only a spur of the higher summit. Certainly, a contemporary British military map is entitled, “A Plan of the Action at Bunker’s Hill.”